The French interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, has promised to “restore order” by cracking down on crime and immigration as critics on the left complained the new government leaned too far towards the “reactionary right”.
On Monday, as Michel Barnier’s new cabinet began work after more than two months of unprecedented political crisis in France, Retailleau said: “The French people want more order – order in the streets, order at the borders.”
He vowed to “speak the truth” about what he described as growing violence in France, saying: “Barbarity is becoming almost a daily [occurrence].”
A Catholic conservative who for years was a senator on the hardline wing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s rightwing party, Les Républicains, Retailleau has become the symbol of the government’s clear shift to the right.
Retailleau, 63, a social conservative and vocal defender of law and order, calls himself “unapologetically of the right”, and in 2013 joined street demonstrations to oppose same-sex marriage – alongside several other rightwing politicians now in government.
This year he voted against the inclusion of the right to abortion in the French constitution. In 2021, Retailleau also opposed a proposed bill to ban so-called conversion therapy – practices that seek to suppress or “cure” a person’s sexual orientation.
Last year, during unrest over the death of a teenager of Algerian heritage at a police traffic stop, Retailleau was criticised for saying there was a kind of “regression to ethnic origins” at play on the streets.
The Socialist leader, Olivier Faure, said on Monday the Barnier administration was “the most rightwing government” in France since the Fifth Republic began in 1958. He added: “The appointment of Bruno Retailleau at the interior ministry is the most striking example of that shift: it’s the reactionary right taking power.”
Ludovic Mendes, a centrist MP, told BFMTV that Retailleau’s appointment was “the return of the old French right”.
Emmanuel Macron shocked France by calling a sudden snap parliament election in June, after his party was trounced by the Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in European elections.
But the snap vote did not deliver Macron’s promised “clarification” of France’s polarised politics. Instead it created confusion – with the national assembly split in three and no group winning an absolute majority of 289 seats.
A left alliance came first in the election, after mass tactical voting to hold back Le Pen’s anti-immigration party, but it was far off an absolute majority.
Macron instead turned to the right, appointing Barnier, whose Les Républicains have fewer than 50 seats in the 577-seat parliament, with a government made up of the right and centrists.
Retailleau has long called for stricter policies on immigration. As a senator, he pushed last year for the most hardline measures in Macron’s latest immigration law.
These measures, including restricting access to social benefits and the introduction of immigration quotas, were so strict that Le Pen claimed the law as an “ideological victory” for her anti-immigration platform.
The Constitutional Council subsequently removed many of the measures it deemed anti-constitutional. It is not clear if Retailleau will try to reintroduce them.
Retailleau comes from the Vendée area in western France and grew up in a village not far from the ruined castle that would later become the Puy du Fou historical theme-park – whose award-winning historical shows have been criticised by historians for traditionalist ideas that have fuelled culture wars.
Retailleau, a keen horserider, made regular appearances on horseback from the age of 17 in the theme park’s huge open-air historical show about the Vendée. He later served for years as a trusted right-hand man to Puy du Fou’s creator, the French politician Philippe de Villiers, who represented traditionalist Catholic, Eurosceptic and national sovereignty politics.
Retailleau worked in local politics and at the theme park before moving to Sarkozy’s traditional right party in 2010. In 2017, he ran the hardline right presidential campaign of the right’s François Fillon, who quit after embezzlement allegations.
Retailleau said as he took office that the new government must listen to all voters, including those “from the first round”, which could be taken to mean Le Pen’s National Rally.
Le Pen’s party acknowledged that it held the key to whether Barnier’s government survived or fell. The left plans to bring a no-confidence vote on 1 October after Barnier’s general policy speech to parliament.
But the left alone does not have the numbers to bring down the government. If Le Pen’s party joins a no-confidence vote in the coming months, the government could fall. “It’s us who decide if the government has a future or not,” said the National Rally MP Jean-Philippe Tanguy.
Barnier urged his ministers to “show respect for all our fellow citizens and all political parties and listen to everybody”. He told them: “No bluster, please.”
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