Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast.

I'm Wolfgang Munchau, and with me are Zuzanne, Munchank and Jack Smith.

Happy New Year to our listeners.

In our first podcast of the year, we will be talking about the new French prime minister

and the cabinet, the new French cabinet.

Susanna, you wrote, you covered the story this week.

Who is Gabrielle-A-Tal and what shall we expect of it?

So yeah, Gabriel Atal was really a surprise nomination.

No one was really seeing them coming.

We had so many other candidates in the pipeline.

We had Bruno Le Mare.

We had Gerard Damagnan, all these kind of heavyweights already there been mentioning before.

Instead, Emmanuel Macron came up with, and Gabriel Atal, a 37-year-old, very gifted politician.

He was speaker before for the party when he was on an election campaigning, but also then from the government, then he rose to them very quickly through the ranks as a budget minister and later as an education minister where he had just enough time to launch an ambitious education reform and was the one who actually prohibited the hijabs in school,

which was a very controversial measure, as you can imagine. It went through quite quickly

and won him some applause from the right. He comes from the left. He was a former socialist,

but he was with Macron very early on. He started with him. He's the mini Macron in his appearance. He's a very smooth orator. He's very good with the cameras. And he likes to also move around very much the trademarks of Macron. Why this reshuffle, which probably needs to roll back a little bit into December.

In December, the government of Elizabeth Bourne, they pushed through the immigration law

because that's what Emmanuel Macron wanted to finish the year of.

And by doing so, they made a lot of compromises to the right and the far right,

actually including some of their basic principles of discriminating against foreign nationals

in their access to housing and employment benefits. So that was a huge controversy also for

...