Macron to name France’s new prime minister on Friday

French President Emmanuel Macron will name a new prime minister on Friday morning, his office said on Thursday, December 12, as pressure mounted to fill the post a week after MPs toppled the government. “The statement naming the prime minister will be published tomorrow morning,” the Elysée presidential palace said on Thursday after Macron returned early from a trip to Poland.

Greens leader Marine Tondelier urged Macron on Thursday to “get out of his comfort zone” as he casts around for a name. “The French public wants a bit of enthusiasm, momentum, fresh wind, something new,” she told France 2 television.

Former prime minister Michel Barnier, whose government had support only from Macron’s centrist camp and his own conservative political family, was felled last week in a confidence vote over his cost-cutting budget. His caretaker administration on Wednesday reviewed a bill designed to keep the lights of government on without a formal financial plan for 2025, allowing tax collection and borrowing to continue. Lawmakers are expected to widely support the draft law when it comes before parliament on Monday.

‘Look to the future’

At issue in the search for a new prime minister are both policies and personalities. Mainstream parties invited by Macron on Tuesday, ranging from the conservative Les Républicains to Socialists, Greens and Communists on the left, disagree deeply. One key issue is whether to maintain Macron’s widely loathed 2023 pension reform that increased the official retirement age to 64, seen by centrists and the right as necessary to balance the budget but blasted by the left as unjust.

On the personality front, Macron’s rumored top pick for a new PM, veteran centrist François Bayrou, raises hackles on both left and right. For the left he would embody a simple “continuation” of the president’s policies to date, Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure has said. Meanwhile, Bayrou is personally disliked by former president Nicolas Sarkozy, still influential on the right and reported to have Macron’s ear.

Other contenders include former Socialist interior minister and prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve, serving Defense Minister and Macron loyalist Sébastien Lecornu, or former foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. But a name could still emerge from outside the pack, as happened with Barnier in September. Those in circulation “are names that have been around for years and haven’t seduced the French. It’s the past. I want us to look to the future,” Greens boss Tondelier said.