He calmly but firmly negotiated the UK’s departure from the EU after years of British squabbling over Brexit, and he prefers consensus to political punch-ups. But Michel Barnier faces his toughest challenge yet as France’s new prime minister amid the country’s biggest political crisis in decades.
The discreet rightwinger, 73, known for his sensible anoraks, love of spreadsheets and his ever-present briefing dossiers wedged under his arm, is facing a baptism of fire in a deeply divided French political landscape.
The left alliance, which won the largest number of seats in the new parliament but fell short of an absolute majority, says his appointment is undemocratic and he should be brought down by a no-confidence vote. Many on the left point out that in 1981 he voted against the decriminalisation of homosexuality.
Marine Le Pen’s far right say they will hold fire and judge him on his programme first. But two far-right MPs recently described Barnier, now France’s oldest premier in modern history, as a Jurassic Park-style “fossil” and a “French Joe Biden” who constantly changes his mind.
Another far-right MP said Barnier, who served as a minister long ago under the right’s Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, had been “brought out of mothballs”. This was at odds with French voters turning out en masse in July’s snap election seeking political change, they said.
Against a backdrop of political rivalry, there is an urgency to Barnier’s appointment, announced on Thursday by Emmanuel Macron after nearly two months of political deadlock. Time is running out to prepare the 2025 budget amid fears of austerity measures and deficit clashes with the EU.
Barnier was known for almost 50 years in rightwing French politics as a centrist, liberal-minded neo-Gaullist, devoted to the European cause. He called himself a “patriot and a European”.
In 2021 he stunned observers by lurching significantly to the right and hardening his stance on immigration and security as part of an unsuccessful attempt to become a presidential candidate against Macron the following year.
At the time, Barnier claimed that unregulated immigration from outside the EU was weakening France’s sense of identity. He believed the UK’s vote to leave the EU showed the dangers of allowing societal divisions to fester.
Shocking many in Brussels, he called for a French moratorium of three to five years for non-European immigrants, under which even family members joining immigrants would be stopped, and called for France to regain legal sovereignty from European Union courts.
Overall, though, Barnier’s political views are close to Macron’s pro-business, pro-Europe stance. Macron wanted a prime minister who would not try to undo controversial measures pushed through in recent years, in particular a rise in the pension age that angered the left. The president also wanted to ensure there was no tampering with his hardline immigration law.
Barnier had previously said he wanted to return to a leading role in French politics. After the 2020 post-Brexit agreement was signed with the UK, he said he realised on Christmas Eve that he missed France and wanted to be “useful” in French politics. “I’ve never been a technocrat; I’ve always been a politician,” Barnier said when he tried to become the presidential candidate for the conservative party Les Républicains.
Born in a suburb of the French Alpine city of Grenoble, he is devoted to the Savoie area of the Alps. He has long styled himself as dependable elder statesman – a mountaineer and hiker from the Alps who built his career in local village politics, likes walks in ancient forests and says it is crucial for leading politicians to “love trees”. He decorated his European Commission office with a photo of his role as a co-organiser of the 1992 Winter Olympics, which led to one French nickname: the Ski Instructor.
First elected aged 22 as a local councillor in Savoie, he entered parliament aged only 27 in 1978. He served four times as a government minister and twice as an EU commissioner. As the commissioner for internal market and services, he negotiated an extensive new regulation of financial markets after the global crash, including measures unpopular in the City of London.
During the Brexit negotiations, he was probably better known in the UK than in France. British figures, mostly leave-voting businesspeople and politicians, often tried to soften him up with food – business leaders offered him a hamper including cheddar, tea and jam, while David Davis had a sumptuous lunch of Welsh lamb prepared in Downing Street in 2017 and then beef wellington at a later lunch in Brussels. But Barnier was known in Brussels to stick to fish at lunch – often plain fish and spinach.
Barnier, although seen as Macron-compatible, has been critical of the president in recent times, questioning the president’s decision to call a “risky” June snap election and calling his top-down way of running the country “solitary” and “arrogant”. In 2022, when Macron’s centrists lost their absolute majority in parliament but remained the biggest force, Barnier said “Macronism” was on its last legs.
In 2022, after Macron was elected for a second term as president, Barnier called on the centrists to “move from a culture of arrogance to a culture of compromise”.
Now, in a parliament divided between three warring groups – the left, the centre and the far right – Barnier needs to show how that culture of compromise might work. Rival groups in parliament could threaten a vote of no confidence and parliament could be dissolved again in less than a year for fresh elections. As Barnier often liked to remark during the Brexit talks, the clock is ticking.