France has a new prime minister

What fresh hell is this?

I’ve been working on an essay about Israel that’s become so long that I’ll need another day just to prune it. I think it will be good when it’s done, but today I just need a break from it. So I’ll tell you about France.

I raised my head from my labors this morning and was surprised to learn that France has a new prime minister. The old one, Élisabeth Borne (poor dutiful drudge), has been given the boot. The new one, Gabriel Attal, looks like this:

At first I wondered this morning if he only looks so young because I am now so old. Did prime ministers always look like someone’s prom date? But no, it’s not me: He’s “the youngest-ever and first openly gay prime minister in French history.” (.)¹

Until now, he’d been the minister of education, and because I’m no longer in school, I’d paid no attention to him. He’s wildly popular, it seems, so I should probably be embarrassed to know so little about him.

This is what the first article I found about him says:

At 37, Gabriel Attal becomes this Tuesday, January 9, the youngest Prime Minister of the Fifth Republic. … However, long before coming out, Attal revealed in 2019 to Closer magazine that he flirted during his adolescence with a singer whose well-known to the French landscape: Joyce Jonathan. “When I was a teenager, he was even one of my first loves,” confessed Jonathan about the interpreter of Je ne sais pas. Separated for many years, the former lovebirds both subsequently found love in politics, as evidenced by the singer’s former relationship with Thomas Hollande, the son of the former president.

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Macron replaced Borne in the hopes of reinvigorating his lame-canard presidency. His coalition is crumbling. Walloped in the parliamentary elections, he’s since been barely been able to govern. Recently, this came to a head in an embarrassing spectacle, probably a significant one.

France, no less than the United States, is riven with rancor about immigrants and immigration policy. The right holds that the left has put out a welcome mat for terrorists and spongers; the left holds that the right is xenophobic and racist. Neither side seems truly keen to move beyond these political clichés and seriously think about what France needs and where it wants to go and how best to absorb the immigrants France needs—and it does need immigrants, because even though France has the highest birth rate in Europe, it’s not high enough.