It’s still a long way off, but 2027 is already on everyone’s minds. And on the side of the majority, a profile comes to play spoilsport: Gabriel Attal, the Minister of National Education. He is ranked as the majority’s second best candidate by a poll.
Published
Reading time :
2 min
:quality(50)/2023/11/01/maxnewsfrfive317642-65420e3ff3325880764804.jpg)
This is what we call a fanfare entry: the one that Jean Castex called “young Gabriel” and to whom the former Prime Minister was looking for a “gnawing bones”, grew up well. Gabriel Attal was tested for the first time for the 2027 presidential election by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP). As a result, he went from out of category to second best candidate in the majority, credited with 19% of the votes behind Édouard Philippe who peaked at 25%. The Minister of Education is therefore doing better than heavyweights in his camp like Bruno Le Maire or Gérald Darmanin. As for François Bayrou, strangely, he was not even tested.
This ranking from Gabriel Attal is not really a surprise. The minister has gained depth since he has been at National Education. This is also why he accepted this supposedly difficult ministry, to deal with reality, with concrete things, so as not to be seen as the eternal spokesperson who favored form over substance. To humanize himself, too, him, the ideal Macronist in whom it is difficult to find any rough edges. Gabriel Attal had the intuition that school and government had become inseparable: authority, fundamentals, secularism. He took up these promising themes in public opinion, and was able, in a few weeks, to find not only a style but a direction.
There’s a void he can step into
Now, who is Gabriel Attal really? He comes from the left but he has blended into the clothes of Macronism like no other. But what is macronism? The difficulty for the former government spokesperson is that he does not yet embody an identified political line or a clear ideological corpus.
He is truly one of the presidential candidates. Gabriel Attal’s breakthrough can be explained because there is no evidence for 2027 in macronia, because the president has no natural heir. Even Édouard Philippe, in the lead, is far from satisfying the desire and the expectation. Now nothing is worse in Emmanuel Macron’s entourage than protruding heads! We know the president’s resentment towards his former prime minister. We also witnessed the live reframing of Gérald Darmanin during his escape to Tourcoing. But above all, regarding Gabriel Attal, it will take more than good intuitions to be a great Minister of National Education and leave a mark. If it successfully launched, it must now work on getting into orbit. He still has everything to prove.