It’s a while since we’ve looked at France, so it’s already more than a month since president Emmanuel Macron ended the immediate stalemate by appointing a centre-right prime minister, Michel Barnier. And that government has so far survived, getting as far as presenting a budget last week. But its longer-term prospects are dubious, to say the least.
Barnier is best known as the European Union’s lead negotiator for Brexit some years ago, but he was also a candidate for the centre-right Republicans’ presidential nomination for the 2022 election, in which he was beaten by Valérie Pécresse. Like her, he represents the party’s more centrist wing, although he appears to have shifted towards the right in recent years, notably as regards immigration.
If Macron was looking for a senior, respected figure who could be the vehicle for co-operation between the centre-right and his own, much larger, centrist group, Barnier seems a good choice. And prior to this year’s snap election, such a combination would have enjoyed a solid parliamentary majority and could potentially have provided stable government.
Now, however, things are quite different. Although they recovered in the second round of the election to do better than many had expected, centre and centre-right still command only 211 of the 577 seats between them. The large majority is held by two other other forces: the relatively compact far right, with 141 seats (including 16 who started out in the Republicans and still sit as a separate group from the main National Rally), and the bigger but more diverse left, or New Popular Front, with 192.*
So Barnier depends for his survival on the sufferance of either left or far right. Not surprisingly, he chose not to seek a vote of confidence two weeks ago when he presented his government’s program to parliament. But that merely delayed the first test; the left promptly moved a motion of no confidence, which was voted on last Tuesday.
The procedure is that such a motion requires an absolute majority so only the votes in favor are recorded; in effect, MPs can back the government simply by abstaining, without having to go on the record. The left’s MPs supported the motion with a rare and impressive unity (one MP from the Communist group was absent), but attracted only a handful of independent MPs and none at all from the other groups, for a total of 197 votes – 92 short of the necessary majority.
In other words, the far right has decided not to turn Barnier out at the first opportunity. But how long that tolerance will last is anyone’s guess. His budget includes tough measures to deal with France’s dire financial position, and since neither left nor far right has much time for fiscal rectitude, he has little chance of passing it unscathed without putting his government’s survival on the line.
Now halfway through his second and final term, Macron, along with most of the French political class, has his eye firmly on the 2027 presidential election. His strategy in calling the early election was to cut some of the ground from under the far right, by either putting it into government before it was ready or by denting the apparent inevitability of its progress.
The appointment of Barnier is a continuation of the same general idea. The far right is being offered a choice: either it becomes a de facto supporter of the government, and therefore liable to sharing its unpopularity and being regarded by its voters as having sold out; or else it wears the responsibility for making the country ungovernable and ultimately forcing another early election (which can only be called once a year has elapsed since the last one).
But this strategy contains a major risk, namely that Barnier and Macron themselves will be seen as the puppets of the far right, and that the government will tack further to the right to secure its support, giving added credibility to National Rally’s positions. This is the vicious circle that so many countries have got themselves into: by, for example, extolling the virtues of being “tough on immigrants”, mainstream leaders just give their voters permission to vote for the extremists who have been saying the same thing longer and more loudly.
Not that the fault is all on Macron’s side. The left could have avoided this by negotiating seriously for an agreement with the centrists, but instead they chose to pursue an all-or-nothing strategy. For the moment that has given them nothing, but their turn may well come.
.
* Another 31 MPs are non-aligned, most of them organised into a group called LIOT. Two seats are currently vacant.
The World is Not Enough 
The description I find in Wikipedia is less clear than that. It suggests that at least some elements of the President’s centrist grouping were willing to work with some elements of the left, while at least some elements of the left were willing to work with some centrists; but it also suggests that the centrists were clear that there were parts of the left they wouldn’t work with just as much as (if not more than) the left were clear that there were some centrists they wouldn’t work with. According to Wikipedia, Ensemble rejected the possibility of being part of a government including La France Insoumise a day before La France Insoumise rejected the possibility of being part of a government that included Ensemble.
There’s at least some chance that if the left had split then a part of the left could have reached an agreement with the centrists, but it was the left’s determined commitment to unity which gained them as good a parliamentary position as they have, and that was unity between groups who have a history of tension between them and at least some reason to dislike each other. That left unity if broken up would probably be hard to regain, and breaking it up would probably be severely damaging not only to the narrowly conceived interests of the left but also to the larger and critically important project of defeating the far right.
LikeLike