Macron Seeks Momentum Reboot With Ambitious Premier Attal

In some ways, Gabriel Attal, the 34-year-old picked by Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday as France’s youngest and first out gay head of government, has been a political star-in-the-making for well over a decade. In a television interview of students at the prestigious university Sciences Po in 2012, Attal made an impassioned speech for why the country’s youth is as engaged in politics as ever, prompting his schoolmates to crown him a “future president.”

Elevating the media-savvy and charismatic Attal, ranked in a poll last month as France’s most-popular politician, to replace the technocratic Elisabeth Borne as prime minister is a measure of the danger President Macron sees in the rise of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally party and the need to bring moderate left and right parties together like he did when he was first elected in 2017.