François Hollande had been invited to talk about the war in Ukraine. But on that Wednesday, March 6, from the second floor of the Elysée Palace, the former Socialist president and Emmanuel Macron, were discussing French politics. It was all about tactics. The anxious current president was desperate to widen his all-too relative majority in Parliament. "You're pursuing a right-wing policy. You have to form an alliance with the right," said Hollande. "I didn't do all this to get here," sighed Macron.
Six months later, the former investment banker, briefly a member of the Parti Socialiste (PS) and advocate of the "en même temps" (a refrain commonly used for positioning himself as a unifying centrist) approach, did "get here." After an ill-timed dissolution of the Assemblée Nationale and a crushing defeat in the legislative elections, on the evening of September 21, the president appointed a government of 39 ministers mixing young Macron loyalists with a dozen elected representatives coming from the most conservative right. "A reactionary government giving the finger to democracy," according to Socialist leader Olivier Faure.
The right-wing Les Républicains (LR) present in the new team are not predominant. But their profile resurrects a so-called "Fillonist" right, named after Nicolas Sarkozy's former prime minister, François Fillon, an unsuccessful presidential candidate in 2017. This conservative Catholic right is embodied by Senator Bruno Retailleau, appointed to the Interior Ministry.
Retailleau was long close to former MP Philippe de Villiers, before breaking with the sovereignist. The senator shocked the world in July 2023 by speaking of young people from immigrant neighborhoods as a "regression toward ethnic origins" and by adopting, in February 2022, the term borrowed from the far right of "French on paper" to refer to naturalized citizens.
This faction of the political right opposed to same-sex marriage is also represented by the names of lesser-known ministers and junior ministers, such as Patrick Hetzel (higher education) or Laurence Garnier (consumer affairs). Garnier is a senator, a figure within La Manif pour Tous (a political organization that opposed same-sex marriage and adoption) and against the criminalization of conversion therapies – practices that aim to "treat" homosexual people to make them renounce their sexual orientation or gender identity. It's as if politics had taken a step backward after the appointment of Gabriel Attal, the youngest prime minister of the Fifth Republic, who said in his general policy speech in January: "To be French in 2024 is to be able to be prime minister while openly affirming your homosexuality."
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