The candidate for French Prime Minister put forward by the leftist New Popular Front coalition, Lucie Castets, has come out of the closet in an interview intended to get ahead of critics. While it lacks the support of President Emmanuel Macron, the leftist alliance maintains it should be allowed to form a government after it won the most of seats in the National Assembly in June’s snap elections.
Lucie Castets, the New Popular Front’s candidate for Prime Minister, announced that she was married to a woman and mother of a young child in an interview with Paris Match magazine, published Tuesday.
“I want to say who I am,” she told the magazine, anticipating attacks on her sexuality for which she said she has already received “messages from far-right haters”, even before the publication of the article.
“I want to find a balance between protecting my family, my wife and our child, and saying who I am,” she explained.
If appointed by Prime Minister, the economist who works for Paris City Hall who was unknown to the general public until recently, would become the second openly gay person to hold the post, after Gabriel Attal.
Macron, who as President appoints the Prime Minister, has dismissed the NFP’s demands to form a government, saying that it lacks the parliamentary majority needed to govern.
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Parliamentary deadlock
The NFP, which won the most seats in June’s snap parliamentary elections, has maintained it should be given the chance.
Castets said that she was ready to work with other lawmakers and “find compromises and work, text by text, with the parliamentarians of the Assembly and the Senate”.
France has been in a state of parliamentary deadlock since the election and Macron said he would keep his outgoing government in place until mid-August, after the Olympic Games.
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This has not stopped speculation about who would be appointed. Xavier Bertrand, of the conservative Republicans party and president of the Hauts-de-France department is one such name, which Castets dismissed.
“How can you appoint a Prime Minister who does not have a majority and who only represents himself?” she said in an interview with the daily Sud Ouest, pointing out that Bertrand’s party only won 47 of 577 seats in parliament.
“This Bertrand hypothesis is, from a democratic point of view, an aberration,” she said.
