Meet France’s ‘hot’ new openly gay prime minister, Gabriel Attal: he was bullied at school and outed by classmate Juan Branco in 2018 – but is he still with fellow politician Stéphane Séjourné?
- At just 34, Gabriel Attal is officially France’s youngest ever prime minister – and the country’s first openly gay leader of the government – but it’s not always been plain sailing
- He was violently threatened for months by classmate Juan Branco, Julian Assange’s lawyer – and has worked with first lady Brigitte Macron to combat bullying once he became education minister
It’s not often that French political appointments make global headlines, but Gabriel Attal is no ordinary politician. At 34 years old, he is officially France’s youngest ever prime minister, as well as the first openly gay man to hold the post.
So who is the man everyone’s talking about, and why is he the subject of so much chatter online since being appointed?
Gabriel Attal’s parents worked in the film industry
While Attal was born and raised in Paris alongside three younger sisters, his parents are not ethnically French. His dad hails from a Tunisian Jewish background and his mum was raised by Orthodox Christians in Odesa, Ukraine, per The Guardian.
His father was the late film producer Yves Attal, who worked on films with Pedro Almodóvar, Roberto Benigni and Bernardo Bertolucci, per IMDB, and his mum – Marie de Couriss – also worked in a production company.
“I couldn’t have dreamed of a better family or received more love than my parents have given me”, Attal wrote in a recent Instagram post.