A month ago my headline was “France’s unending crisis”, and it still fits. Emmanuel Macron’s seventh prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, resigned a week ago after just 26 days in the job and only the day after nominating his ministry. But he agreed to stay on to conduct a further round of negotiations, and on Friday he was reappointed. Yesterday the new ministry was announced.
It’s not very different from the one of a week earlier. Bruno Retailleau, head of the centre-right Republicans and previously interior minister, has this time refused to serve, but several of his party colleagues remain in place. There are a few more non-partisan figures, including Paris police chief Laurent Nunez, who takes over at interior. But the majority, as before, are from Macron’s own party and its centrist allies.
It’s hard to see why Lecornu would have agreed to take back the job if he had not taken some encouraging news from his most recent round of negotiations. Nonetheless, there’s not much sign of it. As we’ve noted here before, the mathematics of the parliamentary situation are relentless. In order to survive, he will need the support, tacit if not explicit, of one of three groups: either (a) the far right, (b) the far left, or (c) both centre-right and centre-left.
Far right and far left have both made it clear that they will vote to oust Lecornu at the first opportunity. Centre-right and centre-left are at this stage being more circumspect. The Republicans have offered co-operation on a “bill-by-bill” basis, while the Socialists are insisting on the suspension (although perhaps not the actual repeal) of Macron’s major legislative achievement, the increase in the pension age.
Meanwhile the clock is ticking for a budget to be presented to parliament tomorrow, and the seriousness of France’s fiscal position still does not seem to have fully impressed itself [link added] on the quarrelling politicians.
The temptation must have been great for Macron to simply throw the ball to Socialist leader Olivier Faure and say “OK, you have a try!” And if Lecornu fails again, that is quite a likely outcome. If a centre-left government could somehow win the acquiescence of the centrists on one side and the far left on the other, it would have a substantial majority (and would probably need it, since there would be bound to be defectors on both flanks). But it’s far from clear how it would ever reconcile its conflicting views on the economy.
Reports last week suggested that Macron was seriously considering another dissolution, but all the signs are that that would make the problem worse rather than better. Since last year’s election, centre and left have both lost ground in the polls while the centre-right has gained; there is still no prospect of anyone winning a majority, and most probably the far right would improve its position and make the country even more ungovernable than it already is.
The World is Not Enough 
And one more example of why Australia should remain confining PR to the Senate.
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France’s Parliament is not a product of PR. They got where they are not because of PR, which they don’t use, but because of the way French voters voted. If Australians voted the same way, we’d have the same kind of Parliament the French do, without PR.
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The National Assembly doesn’t use PR, but single member two round elections. Indeed it’s hard to think of an electoral system more similar to our own.
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Giving Faruqui or Thorpe or Shoebridge any real power would be a mistake.
Extremism is not magically okay if it’s the left.
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The National Assembly doesn’t use PR. It’s a single member system with two rounds of voting. It’s hard to think of an electoral system more similar to our own.
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Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain — all PR, which results in weak coalitions and merry-go-round politics that deny the stability needed for tough but needed for the long-term decisions.
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Yes, as David & J-D said, there’s no PR in the French parliament. My view is that countries with PR – such as Spain, Portugal, Germany, New Zealand & the Scandinavian countries – tend to be better governed than those with single-member districts, but that’s something that reasonable people can disagree about. But France is currently not a good example for the anti-PR position.
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Returning to the actual subject of the post, instead of pursuing somebody’s unrelated pet hobby horse, I read in the news that the French PM has now indicated that he’s prepared to suspend the increase in the pension age until the next Presidential election and that the Socialists have responded to that by saying that now they won’t support the no-confidence motions.
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Indeed – thanks J-D. But even without the Socialists, last night the left still got within 18 votes of success on a no-confidence motion; the Greens & Communists both supported it, as did the far right. So Lecornu has very little margin for error, and he’s got to somehow get a budget approved.
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As with the demand of what is sometimes termed “Hanson-Youngism” by us in the ALP Right for a return to in-community AS processing, not raising the pension age will do nothing to fix the problems that led to the change in the first place.
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As with the demand of what is sometimes termed “Hanson-Youngism” for a return to in-community AS processing, not raising the pension age does nothing to fix the problems that led to the change in the first place.
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True. And the French fiscal crisis is actually real, unlike the made-up asylum seeker “crisis”.
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No, being able to live in the community whilst being processed was being abused. Claimants were absconding and refusing to show up for deportation after their claim was rejected. Or they were dragging things out in the courts. Therefore, Keating’s government took that privilege away.
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Sure, some people abused the process, as happens with everything. But that didn’t amount to a “crisis”, and certainly didn’t justify our descent to barbarism.
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