Macron opposes Barnier’s appointment of ‘anti-gay marriage’ senator as ‘family minister’

Emmanuel Macron has reportedly objected to new French Prime Minister Michel Barnier appointing a senator who campaigned against same-sex marriage as “family minister” in his new cabinet.

Mr Macron, 46, rejected Mr Barnier’s offer to offer the symbolic ministerial post to Laurence Garnier, a conservative senator from the right-wing Republican Party who recently approved legislation on children’s access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

The leaked draft sparked protests from the French left, who warned that Barnier’s government was “veering to the far right”.

Mr Barnier, a 73-year-old right-winger and former EU chief Brexit negotiator, is seeking to form a new government after Mr Macron appointed him prime minister two weeks ago following weeks of political deadlock following snap elections in July that ended in a hung parliament.

The first batch of names were leaked on Thursday evening, with the full 16-minister cabinet expected to be officially announced on Sunday at the latest.

Mr Barnier has proposed giving right-wing, traditionalist senator Bruno Retailleau the important post of interior minister, while Macron supporters have been given seven other ministerial posts.

On Friday, it emerged that he had proposed Ms Garnier – believed to be close to Mr Retailleau – as family minister, replacing Sara El Haïry, a centrist who was the first female minister to publicly reveal her homosexuality and pregnancy as a result of medically assisted procreation.

According to the aide, Mr Macron “alerted” the prime minister about Ms Garnier’s “delicate profile” and said he was against it.

“The president does not want the new team to unravel his reforms. Garnier’s positions are the antithesis of what the previous (government) teams defended,” one anonymous former minister told BFMTV.

Another aide close to the negotiations said: “Ultimately, Michel Barnier is the arbiter: it’s his government. Constitutionally, it’s not the president who directly rejects this or that. He doesn’t block. But he can sound the alarm.”

Reports of her potential nomination have caused consternation on the left.

“I am speechless. I am just furious as hell,” said Manon Aubry, a left-wing MEP from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed party, LFI. MEP Sarah Legrain, also from LFI, called her potential nomination “a huge provocation.”

“We have a government that clearly intends to bring back all the losers of the elections,” said MP Mathilde Panot, also from the LFI. “The names mentioned so far indicate Macron’s far-right tendencies. There is no respect for universal suffrage,” she said.

Some Macron supporters were also concerned.

Guillaume Gouffier Valente, an MP from Macron’s left-wing Renaissance party, said: “Some of the rumours about her nomination to the government are particularly worrying when it comes to defending women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.

“These battles will never be negotiable,” he wrote on X, calling for a “very clear position” from Mr Barnier during his general political statement on 1 October.

“Instead of change, we have renewal”

Former French socialist President François Hollande, now an MP for the left-wing coalition, said Mr Macron and Mr Barnier had apparently forgotten that many centrist and right-wing MPs owed their elections in July to the “republican front”, which had led leftists to withdraw from the second round to prevent a victory for the National Rally.

“Why was there a dissolution if it was only to redirect more or less the same people, even further to the right?” he asked. “Instead of a change, we have a restaurant.”

Ms Garnier has been praised for leading the review of Macron’s bill to introduce quotas for women in management positions at large companies.

However, in 2013 she opposed same-sex marriage and supported the Manif pour tous (anti-gay marriage) movement opposing François Hollande’s legalisation that was passed the same year.

In 2021, she also opposed the introduction of a crime punishing conversion therapy, i.e. practices aimed at imposing heterosexuality on LGBT people.

In February 2024, she voted against including a guaranteed freedom of abortion in the constitution: “Our fellow citizens expect the government to focus on getting our country back on its feet, not on problems that do not exist,” she argued.

A few weeks later, she approved a controversial Senate bill aimed at regulating gender reassignment among minors, specifically by banning the prescription of cross-sex hormones and imposing strict conditions on the administration of “puberty blockers” to these young people.

France’s snap parliamentary elections in July split the National Assembly into three blocs around the left-wing coalition, the pro-Macron centre, and Marine Le Pen’s populist and Eurosceptic National Rally.

The left-wing New Popular Front has the largest number of MPs, but Mr Macron has rejected his candidacy for prime minister, saying it would be immediately recalled in a vote of no confidence. Privately telling aides he believed France was fundamentally a “right-wing country”, he chose Mr Barnier after receiving assurances from Le Pen’s camp that he would not automatically vote against him.

France urgently needs a budget to tackle a growing public deficit that is set to reach 5.6% of GDP this year, with state auditor Pierre Moscovici warning that the budget risks being “the most difficult to put together in the history of the Fifth Republic.”

Pierre Moscovici, president of the State Fiscal Control Office, warned on Friday that the budget risks being “the most difficult to draw up in the history of the Fifth Republic.”

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