Sept. 5 (UPI) — French President Emmanuel Macron Thursday appointed the right-wing Les Republicains Party’s Michel Barnier as the new prime minister.
“This appointment comes after an unprecedented cycle of consultations, and in view of his constitutional duty, the president made sure that the prime minister and its government will have the most stable conditions possible,” The Elysée Palace said in a statement.
The statement added that Macron has tasked Barnier with “forming a unifying government to serve the country and the French people.”
Right-wing National Rally leader Marie Le Pen reacted on X to Barnier’s appointment by saying he should respect the National Rally’s 11 million voters as he forms a government.
“We will demand that the new head of government respect the 11 million French people who voted for the National Rally, that he respects them as persons and their ideas,” Le Pen wrote on X. “We will be attentive to the project that he will carry, and attentive to ensuring that the aspirations of our voters, who represent a third of the French, are heard and respected.”
In the July election the New Popular Front won the most seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, blocking Marie Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally from getting a majority, but the New Popular Front did not win a governing majority either. Macron’s centrist party Ensemble came in second and the right-wing National Rally got the third highest number of seats.
That set the stage for gridlock and created the divided legislature Barnier now faces as the new prime minister.
Despite the New Popular Front’s election results, Macron selected Barnier over the New Popular Front’s candidate Lucie Castets as the party said in a statement ahead of Barnier’s appointment that forming a government with tacit far-right support “would be a total negation of the parliamentary election that saw the French … massively reject the rise to power of the National Rally.”
Reacting to Macron’s rejection of the New Popular Front’s prime minister candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon of the leftist France Unbowed Party declared on X, that the election “was stolen from the French people.”
“In all democracies in the world, it is the coalition that comes out on top that is called upon to form a government. Never the party that lost the election. Creating this precedent would be dramatic and dangerous for the institutions themselves,” the Socialist Party’s Olivier Faure said in a statement on X.
