Film buff, gay, loyal, raised in an elite school… This is Gabriel Attal, Prime Minister of France

The president, Emmanuel Macron, does not seem to have been carried away by doubts or prejudices in his choice. He has not even cared about appointing someone with less gray hair than him as prime minister – until now, his three previous appointees were older than him – and with a profile, due to his openly declared homosexuality, that he knows will not be liked in all sectors. Attal has a reputation for being the president's darling and, above all, a true prodigy who is not challenged. Efficient, loyal, ambitious… he was raised in the town of Clamart, in the southwest of France, in respect for that diversity that his country proclaims almost as a national motto.

The successor of Élisabeth Borne, who resigned on Monday after twenty hectic months in office, is the son of a descendant of the Gallic nobility, Marie de Couriss, and the Franco-Tunisian Yves Attal, a well-known filmmaker who appears in the credits. of Spanish blockbusters such as 'High heels', by Pedro Almodóvar, or 'Acción mutant', by Álex de la Iglesia, for his work as production director. From his father he has inherited that passion for the seventh art to the point of wanting to be a theater actor when he was in school. He himself told it in front of the cameras when he was 9 years old and the television showed at the Alsatian School, the elite educational institution where he trained.

dazzling career

Politics was not among the plans of little Attal, who received a humanist and multicultural education and as a teenager opted for law. But the diversity is carried even in the genes, with Hebrew and Russian roots. Education was one of the pillars of the home in which he grew up and also the portfolio that he has held for just under half a year in the Borne Executive, where he has faced the murder of a teacher at an institute in Arras, in the north of the country, and has adopted controversial measures such as the ban on the abaya – the tunic that covers the body of many Muslim women – among female students. Those who know him assure that his pulse does not usually tremble. The fight against bullying, a problem that he himself admitted to having suffered, stood out as one of his great objectives, which raised his popularity within a very affected Government.

The prime minister, who passed through the Socialist Party before joining the ranks of Renaissance, Macron's party, has cut his teeth in politics since he was in his twenties. At 22 years old he appeared as a counselor in the Ministry of Health. At 29 he was appointed Secretary of State – of Youth, and curiously the youngest person to be part of an Executive in the current Republic – and shortly after he was elected Vice Minister of Public Accounts. In July 2023 he launched his own portfolio, National Education, one of the heavyweights in French governments. Yesterday he became the fourth prime minister appointed by the president, who trusts him to overcome a legislature where he has had headaches and controversies, from pension reform to immigration reform.

When Macron began campaigning on his own with Renaissance, he had Attal among his first followers. He soon became one of his faithful collaborators. So much so that, at the end of 2018, in the midst of the yellow vest crisis, with the country dotted with barricades and violent protests, he was in charge of representing the Executive in a special on the public channel France 2 in 'prime time'. Nobody else wanted to show their face. The now prime minister has shown that he does not mind being clear or speaking bluntly, and he has also shown this when sharing his sexual orientation. He even in the form of reports with his partner, Stéphane Séjourné, as the fashionable couple in power.

They live together and both move in the political arena. Séjourné serves as leader of Renew Europe, the family of European liberals where acronyms such as the PNV are included. As the new prime minister, he will also try to ensure that the extreme right does not take over his ground at the polls, in his case, in the community elections in June. The political vocation, says Attal's entourage, put aside the young prime minister's desire to succeed as an actor, precisely when he went with his parents to a demonstration against Le Pen's extreme right in Paris. He was 13 years old, but he has always been precocious.