Emmanuel Macron refuses to accept prime minister’s resignation

Gabriel Attal, Emmanuel Macron’s popular young prime minister, tried to talk the French president out of dissolving parliament and to accept his resignation, it emerged on Monday.

“I am the fuse”, Mr Attal, 35, told Mr Macron on Sunday evening, according to BFM TV. “Use me as the fuse,” he reportedly urged his 46-year-old boss, offering himself as a sacrificial lamb following the heavy defeat in European parliamentary elections.

Mr Macron reportedly declined and told his poster boy prime minister that he was “the best person” to front the legislative campaign ahead of the two-round general election on June 30 and July 7.

The reported Macron plan is to place Mr Attal, who frequently polls as one of France’s most popular political figures, head-to-head with Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s equally popular protégé and National Rally leader.

Ms Le Pen, 55, has made it clear that Mr Bardella, 28, who is an MEP, would become prime minister if her party came first in the legislative ballot, leaving her to focus on preparing her fourth run for the presidency in 2027.

Mr Attal, who harks from the Left, was a popular education minister before Mr Macron appointed him in January as France’s youngest-ever and first openly gay prime minister to ever occupy the office.

Credited with presidential ambitions, Mr Attal played a front-line role in seeking to save Mr Macron’s floundering European election campaign, appearing alongside its lacklustre leader Valérie Hayer at various rallies. He even made a controversial surprise appearance during a TV interview, where he was accused of “manterrupting” Ms Hayer.

While he failed to turn the electoral tide, he won plaudits within his own camp during a head-to-head TV debate with Mr Bardella that most pundits saw him as comfortably winning on points. Polls suggested, however, that voters saw it as a draw at best.

Trounced by the Le Pen camp in Sunday’s European elections, Mr Macron has no workable parliamentary majority. The decision to hold snap elections would allow “the French people to make the fairest choice for themselves” and to “clarify” the political landscape, the president insisted.

Some commentators are calling the decision double or quits, others political suicide prompted by hubris and a sense of “après moi, le déluge”. Many in Mr Macron’s camp were taken by surprise.

The prospect that France will have a populist Right-wing prime minister when it stages the Olympics this summer is now real. It would be the first time the hard-Right has run the country since Marshal Philippe Pétain collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War.

But according to Le Monde, on Sunday evening, after his speech at the Elysée, Mr Macron told stunned ministers: “It is better to write history than to endure it”. No one dared to contradict him.