French leftist front proposes financial crime fighter as prime minister candidate

PARIS (Reuters) -France’s leftist New Popular Front coalition, which won the largest number of seats in parliament in elections this month, said it will propose financial crime specialist Lucie Castets as its candidate for prime minister to President Emmanuel Macron.

Castets is a director of finance and purchasing at Paris city hall. She graduated from France’s elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration school for civil servants in 2013, but she has no background in party politics and is unknown to the public.

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“Having worked in the fight against tax fraud and financial crime, and with a background in NGO work, she will have our full support in the government that she will lead,” the four parties said in a joint statement.

In a statement to French news agency AFP, Castets said she was honoured to be proposed and added that if she were to be appointed PM she would work to reverse Macron’s pension reform, which increased the legal retirement age to 64 from 62.

According to her LinkedIn profile, she is a specialist in the fight against money laundering and terrorism financing and has worked at the Financial Action Task Force, the French treasury and the World Bank.

The four parties in the leftist NPF – the hard-left France Unbowed, the Socialists, the Greens and the Communists – have been arguing for weeks over who to propose as prime minister.

With the highest number of seats in parliament, the coalition has the right to propose a new prime minister to succeed to outgoing Gabriel Attal, but the coalition does not have enough seats to form a majority government.

Macron’s office did not immediately return a request for comment on Castets.

France is in a state of parliamentary deadlock since Macron’s decision to call the election, with the current government likely to carry out its functions throughout the summer in a caretaker capacity.

(Reporting by Michel Rose and Geert De Clercq, Editing by Alex Richardson and Cynthia Osterman)