While French president Emmanuel Macron plays the not entirely enviable role of a world statesman at Davos, his prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has the essential if less glamorous task of getting a budget through parliament. It’s been touch and go, but this week it seems he has succeeded. That success, however, cannot hide a longer-term systemic failure, in which France is not alone.
As you may remember, before Christmas Lecornu won approval for the first of his main budget bills with a margin of 13 votes, 247 to 234. Negotiations in the succeeding days failed to reach agreement on the other main bill (the state budget bill), so an emergency measure was passed to roll over existing provisions into the new year. Further talks were held this month, but by last week it was clear that an agreement was out of sight.
Sort of. The Socialist Party, representing the most critical bloc of votes that Lecornu needs, wasn’t willing to support the budget in parliament. But it indicated that he had done enough for it to let it through if he treated it as an issue of confidence: that is, it would not vote to bring down the government. Lecornu had previously promised not to use that procedure (known as article 49.3) on the budget, but having gone as far as negotiations would take him he decided that breaking that promise was the best of the available options.
So this week he did just that, trusting that there would be a sufficient number of MPs – particularly the Socialists – who, while unwilling to actually vote for the budget, will not go so far as to support the no-confidence motions duly moved by far left and far right. Because a no-confidence motion requires an absolute majority, abstention is equivalent to support, so the expectation is that Lecornu will survive the votes being held tonight.
Le Monde’s editorial, while accepting that “Lecornu chose the least bad solution,” criticised the parliamentarians for their posturing, with “each group … obsessed with its own image and indifferent to overall coherence.” But at least something like a governing majority has finally been assembled. As Socialist leader Olivier Faure put it, “the French people made a choice a year and a half ago: they didn’t give a majority to anyone and told us, basically, ‘deal with it’. Well, we’re dealing with it.”
The underlying situation, however, is grim. At best there is a narrow majority for a mainstream government, beset by extremes on each flank that will never co-operate for anything constructive but are close to a majority between them. And this has become typical of much of Europe. Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Romania, Poland – all have held elections recently in which pro-democracy forces were victorious, but only in combination. If only one side can safely be allowed to win, democracy is in peril.
Now Australia seems to be going the same way. The opposition Liberal and National parties, whose coalition came to grief yesterday after the Nationals walked out, are becoming harder to distinguish from their far-right rival, One Nation. A formal alliance seems only a matter of time.
When a centre-right leader tried that in France his party rebelled, and it’s possible some elements of the Liberal Party would do the same. But it’s most unlikely that they could survive as an independent force: as in France, the only alternative to membership of a far-right coalition would be to co-operate with the centre and centre-left.
For a century or more, politics in Australia, as across the democratic world, was based on the idea that there were two (or more) parties that were content to operate within the system. They might differ on important matters of policy or philosophy, but they agreed on fundamentals: each accepted the legitimacy both of the system and of each other, and they could alternate in power without either of them attempting to tear up the rule book.
From the point of view of parties that were opposed to the whole system, this looked like a cosy conspiracy of the elites, and sometimes no doubt it was. But it worked for those anti-system parties as well: without being contenders for power in their own right, they could exert pressure around the edges and often move the system in their preferred direction. Change was always possible, but it would be gradual not revolutionary.
Those foundational assumptions are now vanishing. Parties dedicated to the overthrow of the system have become too strong to be ignored. While in most places they are still well short of majority support, their share of the vote is sufficiently large that there is no longer room for two mainstream parties in competition. The supporters of democracy can still win by combining, but they cannot sustain the system in the old way.
If democracy is to survive, parties from outside the system will have to be co-opted into it. Far left or far right (or both) will have to make their peace with the system, and it with them. We know this is possible; Greece’s Syriza and Brothers of Italy are respective examples. But we also know that it sometimes fails badly. As I remarked almost twenty years ago, “The establishment politicians who tried that tactic with Adolf Hitler in 1933 found they had made a costly mistake.”
The democracies have made plenty of mistakes already in the last few years. One day our luck will run out.
The World is Not Enough 