Prime Minister’s costume to talk about the fight against drones during the 2024 Olympic Games which begin on Friday, deputy’s costume as head of a parliamentary group to prepare a “coalition pact”: Gabriel Attal is alternating between roles this summer, an unprecedented situation in France.
“Nothing should be able to escape us.” In front of a Fennec helicopter capable of intercepting aircraft, Gabriel Attal praises the mobilization of the armies in the fight against drones during the Paris Olympics, a crucial security issue for this global event.
Because in France, it is the Prime Minister who is directly responsible for airspace security. If a plane refuses to comply and has to be destroyed — which has never happened — it is he who makes the decision at the end of a very short chain of command.
However, the young prime minister, appointed on January 9, no longer has all his prerogatives since the French president, Emmanuel Macron, accepted the resignation of his government a week ago, after the failure of his camp in the early legislative elections of June 30 and July 7, where it came second, behind the left and ahead of the extreme right.
Having become head of a “resigned” government, Gabriel Attal is now only responsible for current affairs, into which the Olympic Games have slipped, due to their exceptional nature.
Just in time
However, since he “resigned”, Gabriel Attal, who was re-elected as a deputy in Hauts-de-Seine (west of the capital), has regained his parliamentary mandate and can sit in the National Assembly, the lower house of the French Parliament. He is now even paid in this capacity, and no longer as Prime Minister.
Fully elected, he was able to spend long hours in the National Assembly to consolidate a group of deputies from the Macronist camp who were very affected by the dissolution, but who appreciated his investment in the campaign. And they quickly elected him president of their group on the Saturday following the government’s resignation.
Caught up in the urgency of current events, Gabriel Attal nevertheless put his prime minister’s cap back on last Thursday in Nice after an arson attack that left seven dead. On this occasion, he took his Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, who was once a competitor for the presidency of the group in the Assembly and who kept a low profile at his side in front of the cameras.
This trip did not prevent him from returning to Paris just in time, this time as a deputy, in the afternoon, to participate in the election of the president of the National Assembly and in all the votes that followed on the key positions in the Lower House.
On Sunday, still in his role as group leader, he wrote to his deputies to ask them to formulate proposals for a “coalition pact” with the Republican left and/or right. As if he were working on a government basis for his successor, who has still not been designated.
Gabriel Attal nevertheless assures that he “will not” be the next prime minister and his entourage specifies that this “coalition” initiative is purely legislative.
“To appear”
The boundaries between executive and legislative powers have thus become very porous in France, while the Constitution stipulates that “the functions of member of the government are incompatible with the exercise of any parliamentary mandate”, unlike in the United Kingdom, where ministers are necessarily deputies.
But the electoral code seems to authorize the dual role when the government resigns, even if this configuration is regularly debated among specialists.
Gabriel Attal’s entourage emphasizes that the Assembly will no longer sit this summer — a traditional break for parliamentarians — which will allow him to wear his deputy’s costume less often.
“The fact that we are all fully employed in our positions, I don’t know for how long, does not seem to me to be the answer to the democratic vote that was expressed,” believes one minister, however. Because a resigning government can no longer be overthrown by Parliament, to which it is no longer responsible.
Faced with this double “minimally baroque” cap, unprecedented under the Ve Republic, this minister pleads for a new government to be found before the resumption of work of the Assembly, which begins in September in committees.
He also made a decision: he will not participate in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games on Friday. “I am not here to show off, I am here to manage current affairs,” he said.