President Emmanuel Macron accepts Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s resignation but asks him to remain in a caretaker role.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron has accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s government, which will now serve in a caretaker capacity, the Elysee Palace said.
It will “handle day-to-day business until a new government is named”, the palace said in a statement on Tuesday.
Macron’s centrist Ensemble alliance was beaten by the New Popular Front (NFP), a broad alliance of leftist and environmental parties, in snap parliamentary elections earlier this month.
The vote left the National Assembly with no dominant political bloc in power for the first time in the history of France’s modern republic, and a coalition government has yet to be formed between alliances or political parties.
Until a government is formed, Attal’s caretaker government will run current affairs in the eurozone’s second-largest economy. Its role will also include making sure that the Olympic Games, which start on July 26, run smoothly.
The caretaker government cannot submit new laws to parliament or make any major changes.
“Handling current affairs means implementing measures already decided and managing emergencies that arise. No more, no less,” Mathieu Disant, a law professor at Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University, told Reuters.
“An outgoing government is deprived of its full powers. This completely – and quite logically – deprives it of any margin for political action.”
There have been caretaker governments before in France, but none has ever stayed on for more than a few days. There is no set limit to how long an acting government can stay on. Parliament cannot force it to quit.
Attal, 34, was appointed as France’s prime minister in January. He rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic and served as France’s education minister before becoming the prime minister.
As education minister, his first move was to ban the Muslim abaya dress in state schools, making him popular among conservatives in France.
