Gabriel Attal, France’s 34-year-old education minister, has been named the country’s new prime minister in a historic appointment by President Emmanuel Macron as he seeks to jump-start his government’s declining popularity.
Attal will be France’s youngest prime minister in history and the first openly gay man to serve in the post – making him one of the world’s most prominent and powerful LGBTQ politicians.
Attal, a rising star in Macron’s Renaissance party, has been minister of education and national youth since July. During his tenure, he enacted the controversial abaya ban in French public schools and worked to raise awareness of bullying in schools.
Attal, like the French president, was affiliated with the center-left Socialist Party before joining Macron’s centrist political movement. In recent years, his politics have occasionally drifted to the right, although he has maintained a shape-shifting political identity in the form of his boss.
Attal was the government’s spokesman during the pandemic, which immediately boosted his profile among the general French public. His political career has since progressed at lightning speed for a man of his age. During Macron’s second term, Attal was put in charge of the Ministry of Public Works and Public Accounts before becoming Minister of Education.
As prime minister, he will be tasked with forming a new government and securing the passage of legislation that advances the president’s agenda. However, most of the power is held by the French Presidency.
He replaces Elisabeth Borne, who resigned Monday after a tumultuous 20-month tenure marked by unpopular pension reforms and urban unrest last summer that followed the police shooting of a teenage boy of Algerian descent.
Borneo, meanwhile, said she had “executed projects that seemed right and necessary for our country” and was “proud of the work done in these almost 20 months.”
Borneo became the first female prime minister in three decades when Macron appointed her to the post in May 2022, shortly after his re-election. Her party then failed to win an absolute majority in parliamentary elections the following month, which ultimately crippled her government’s ability to pass new laws.
