Michel Barnier: Facing nationalism and populism, more experience and more Europe

Michel Barnier was named France's new prime minister, the Elysee Palace announced on 5 September 2024, almost two months after legislative elections left the country in a political deadlock - AFP/LUDOVIC MARIN

Carlos Uriarte Sánchez

05 de septiembre de 2024 (19:16 h.)

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European Union France

With the Paris Olympic Games over, and with an acting government in France, at the request of President Emmanuel Macron so as not to give rise to changes in the face of such an important international event; after consultations that began on Friday 30 August, on 5 September, after 41 days of political deadlock, the President of the French Republic appointed Michel Barnier as Prime Minister, commissioning him to form a government.

This appointment, which is undoubtedly a guarantee of stability and efficient management, falls to a politician of great experience, who had already served as foreign minister and agriculture minister under Jacques Chirac. A veteran Gaullist conservative politician with a pro-European profile, he is 73 years old and, in addition to having held positions of responsibility in previous governments in France, he has also been a member of the European Union both as a Member of the European Parliament and as a member of the Community Executive, holding the portfolios of regional policy and reform of the institutions during the Prodi Commission and the internal market and services under the leadership of Durao Barroso. Michel Barnier has also been the EU's chief negotiator with the British government on Brexit, i.e. the divorce between the UK and the EU and their future relationship.

Michel Barnier, married and father of 3 children, a militant of the French Gaullist movement since the age of 14, brings together the experience and the pro-European vision that France so badly needs at a crucial moment for the European Union. We must bear in mind that France is one of the founding countries of the EU, but more importantly, it is the second largest economy in the Eurozone. He is the person who can also maintain a serious discourse away from populist solutions to the challenge of illegal immigration. He has expressed the importance of immediately stopping the regulations, rigorously limiting family reunification, reducing the catching of foreign students and the systematic enforcement of double punishment’.

Barnier advocates a moratorium of 3 to 5 years on immigration to the European Union and in this way study the problems associated with immigration in France. In this sense, the new Prime Minister of France advocates a legal sovereignty for France in this sensitive area, a kind of ‘constitutional shield’, with the aim of ensuring that decisions on immigration are not threatened by rulings from the Court of Justice of the European Union (Luxembourg) or the European Court of Human Rights (Strasbourg), or even by an interpretation by the French judiciary. We will have to see how he deals with this challenge when he is actually in government.

What is clear is that Emmanuel Macron has opted for a French and European centre-right prime minister, as opposed to the extremes and the nationalist and populist discourses that could be represented by the National Rally parties of Marie Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon's Unsubmissive France.

Therefore, in the face of nationalism and populism, the solution in France has been stability, experience, common sense and Europeanism, which gives France, and the European Union, a breathing space to get things done and gradually deflate the extremes.

Carlos Uriarte Sánchez, Secretary General of Paneuropa Spain and Vice-President of the European Coudenhove-Kalergi Society