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Gabriel Attal<\/a>, 34, is a new kind of French prime minister, more inclined to Diet Coke than a good Burgundy, at home with social media and revelations about his personal life, a natural communicator who reels off one liners like \u201cFrance rhymes with power\u201d to assert his \u201cauthority,\u201d a favorite word.<\/p>\n Since taking office in early January, the boyish-looking Mr. Attal has waded into the countryside, far from his familiar haunts in the chic quarters of Paris, muddied his dress shoes, propped his notes on a choreographed bale of hay, and calmed protesting farmers<\/a> through adroit negotiation leavened by multiple concessions.<\/p>\n He has told rail workers threatening a strike that \u201cworking is a duty,\u201d not an everyday French admonition. He has shown off his new dog on Instagram and explained that he called the high-energy Chow Chow \u201cVolta\u201d after the inventor of the electric battery. He has told the National Assembly that he is the living proof of a changing France as \u201ca prime minister who assumes his homosexuality.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n France does budge, but whether it is ready for the control-the-narrative politics of emotion and distraction that Mr. Attal embodies is an open question. Time is short. The prime minister\u2019s mission, as conceived by an embattled President Emmanuel Macron, is clear: reverse the ascendancy of the far right of Marine Le Pen ahead of European Parliament elections in June and a French presidential election just over three years from now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Macron is term limited and must leave office in 2027; the specter that haunts him is Ms. Le Pen as his successor. In Mr. Attal, he hopes to cultivate one of his own.<\/p>\n \u201cMacron is amazed by Attal, the way one is amazed by someone who has transgressed like oneself, and who at the same time is of an absolute loyalty,\u201d Marisol Touraine, a former minister of health and social affairs who has been Mr. Attal\u2019s political guru, said in an interview. \u201cThe president believes in Attal\u2019s political sixth sense.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201ctransgression\u201d of both men was that of restive youth against the old order. Neither Mr. Macron nor Mr. Attal ever saw a taboo he did not want to shatter. Mr. Macron was a one-man revolution when he came to power in 2017 at the age of 39, proclaiming the politics of left and right defunct and offering a malleable post-ideological thing called \u201cMacronism.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, almost seven years on, Mr. Macron is looking to his prot\u00e9g\u00e9, or some say, clone, to re-inject political excitement. Pragmatism, not conviction, has defined Mr. Attal. Now, he must deliver in a prickly France, without an absolute majority in Parliament and knowing that, as Cl\u00e9ment Beaune, the former transport minister put it, \u201cTo be prime minister here is very tough because it\u2019s the president who decides.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe question that looms is how far Macron will let Attal go without growing jealous,\u201d said Philippe Labro, an author and political commentator. Sharing the spotlight does not come easily to Mr. Macron, as became evident when one former prime minister, \u00c9douard Philippe, became popular and was eased out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A recent poll for Paris Match magazine showed Mr. Attal with a 47 percent approval rating, which is high by French standards. Mr. Macron sank to 32 percent, with Ms. Le Pen at 43 percent.<\/p>\n Mr. Attal\u2019s challenge will be to use the hand that Mr. Marcon has given him but not appear to bite it as he steps out of the shadow of the president. Already the two men have parted company over Ms. Le Pen\u2019s National Rally.<\/p>\n This month Mr. Macron said he considers the party \u201coutside the arc of the republic,\u201d broadly meaning anti-democratic, even as Mr. Attal declared that the \u201carc of the republic is the hemicycle\u201d of the National Assembly, and that he would work with all parties there, including the far-right party, which holds 89 seats.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAttal wants to become president and will do everything to achieve that,\u201d said Ms. Touraine, whose daughter was a friend of Mr. Attal in school. \u201cIs he ambitious? Yes, in an extreme way. But he has no complexes. He assumes who he is, and I find that positive.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Attal, who did not respond to requests for an interview, has been on a whirlwind political journey to the prime minister\u2019s office, known as Matignon. Born in 1989 into an affluent Parisian family, Jewish on his father\u2019s side and Orthodox Christian on his mother\u2019s, he was educated at an elite private school and the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, before drifting into politics, essentially the only job he\u2019s ever had.<\/p>\n \u201c\u00c9cole Alsacienne, Sciences Po, National Assembly, Ministry of Education, Matignon, the career of Gabriel Attal spans 6 kilometers,\u201d mocked<\/a> Fran\u00e7ois Ruffin, a left-wing lawmaker on X, formerly Twitter, adding, \u201cDisruption and audacity, but not too far from his class.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Attal\u2019s youth was not without its challenges, however. As a teenager he was bullied at school for being gay. \u201cIt was a torrent of insults and abuse, and it went on for many months with an extreme violence,\u201d he told TF1 television last year. \u201cI suffered.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The suffering was redoubled because he did not want to tell his family, afraid \u201cthey would ask why this was being said\u201d when he was not ready to talk about being gay. At last, a decade later, Mr. Attal, in his account, approached his father on his deathbed in 2015 and said, \u201cPapa, I have fallen in love with a man.\u201d His father responded positively, was eager to meet the man, but died the next day.<\/p>\n France, where the privacy of love and sex has been near sacred, is unused to such dramatic avowals, but Mr. Attal is a disrupter, even as he exercises extreme discipline. A \u201ccontrol freak,\u201d in the words of Ms. Touraine, he has understood that in the age of the short attention span, the way to dictate the agenda is through relentless, varied communication.<\/p>\n