Appointed Thursday at the head of the Ministry of National Education, Gabriel Attal, 34, continues a remarkable rise: if he remains the youngest of the government, this young shoot of Macronie has established itself as a must of the executive. Now boss of the “mammoth” – he is the youngest under the Fifth Republic to take care of this first state budget – where he succeeds Pap Ndiaye, Gabriel Attal will have to face many challenges: teacher recruitment crisis, school harassment, controversies over secularism, etc.
During the transfer of power with Pap Ndiaye, in the courtyard of the Ministry of National Education, Gabriel Attal gave himself a roadmap with “three priorities”: “respect for authority and fundamental knowledge at the heart of the school”, the non-replacement of absent teachers and the well-being of students which involves the fight against school harassment.
The one who did his schooling in the posh Alsatian School in Paris before graduating from Sciences Po also chose to clear up two reproaches as soon as he took office: his young age and his passage in this ultra-elitist private school. “You can be 34 years old and have heavy responsibilities. One in three teachers is under 40,” he said. “Yes I went to private school. I don’t have to deny and apologize,” he added, calling not to “criticize parents who make this choice.”
“Political sense” or “head to slaps of the first of the class”
The appointment of Gabriel Attal, who has often shown an interest in the school question, is worth any consecration, four years after becoming the youngest member of the government. At the time in charge of the modest State Secretariat for Youth, his agreement was deplorable with his minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer… whose seat he will now occupy.
His supporters praise his “capacity for work” and his “political sense”, as much as an ambition assumed by the one whose father was a film producer: “If I had forbidden myself things, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today”, he admitted in June on Europe 1. His critics are thus in despair of “a slap in the face side of the first in the class”.
Coming from the Strauss-Kahn movement, this “spiritual son of Marisol Touraine” had passed through the cabinet of the Minister of Health of François Hollande. In 2016, he was one of the first socialists to follow Emmanuel Macron during the creation of his movement. After the 2017 victory, Gabriel Attal was elected deputy in a right-wing stronghold of Hauts-de-Seine, where he was reappointed in June 2022.
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In July 2020, when he arrived at Matignon, the new Prime Minister Jean Castex wondered: “Have we found an additional bone to gnaw on for young Gabriel? To cut his teeth, he finally inherits the government spokesperson, an exposed position that can reveal talents as much as betray weaknesses.
From television sets to press conferences at the end of the Council of Ministers, Gabriel Attal reveals himself in this after-sales service exercise for the second part of the five-year term, marked by the Covid-19 crisis, even if his self-assurance sometimes betrays him: he must thus make his mea culpa when he assures that no teacher will earn less than 2,000 euros per month in 2022, when the measure should not apply until… two years later. The fact remains that he has established himself over the months as one of the rare members of the government to make a name for himself in public opinion.
Enough to win new stripes after the re-election of Emmanuel Macron, who appointed him Minister Delegate for Public Accounts in the spring of 2022. In this post as austere as it is strategic, he above all set out to do battle with the far right, donning his cape as a defender of the middle classes to try to win back a disillusioned electorate.
His certain media ease also allows him to be one of the ministers sent to the front line to defend the pension reform. “Budgetary choices are above all political choices” which take into account “what is happening” in the country, confided to AFP at the beginning of June, the one described by his entourage as “a hard worker who quickly seizes subjects “. Before pointing out a weakness of the ambitious: a difficult balance between “communication and substance”.