In
picking Barnier, Macron has put his – and France’s – fate in Le Pen’s hands
Paul Taylor
After months
of dithering, the French president’s choice of prime minister leaves him more
vulnerable than ever
Fri 6 Sep
2024 08.00 CEST
Waiting two
months for a new prime minister may be standard procedure for the Belgians,
Dutch, Germans or Italians, inured to extended coalition negotiations, but to
the French 50 days has seemed like an insufferable eternity. This was not the
way things were supposed to be in the Fifth Republic, with a constitution
framed in 1958 to deliver stable parliamentary majorities for a powerful
president, Charles de Gaulle. Le général must be spinning in his grave.
His distant
successor in the Élysée Palace, Emmanuel Macron, spent all summer dithering
over a way out of the mess he created himself when he dissolved the national
assembly and called a snap election in June. The option he finally chose on
Thursday, bringing Michel Barnier, a conservative Gaullist former European
commissioner, foreign minister and Brexit negotiator, out of retirement at 73
to lead a government, seems unlikely to offer a stable solution.
Barnier,
whose Les Républicains (LR) party finished a distant fourth in the election
with just 47 of the 577 parliamentary seats, has a reputation as a consensus
builder and a safe, if unimaginative, pair of hands. But his survival in
government will depend entirely on the goodwill of Marine Le Pen’s far-right
National Rally (RN). That makes her the kingmaker and allows her to pull the
plug on Barnier, and perhaps on Macron, whenever it suits her to back a
no-confidence vote.
When he
dissolved parliament in June, Macron said he wanted the electorate’s
“clarification” after the RN surged to first place in European parliament
elections. Instead, voters delivered a hung parliament with the leftwing New
Popular Front (NFP) – an alliance of socialists, greens, communists and radical
leftists – as the largest bloc, but well short of a majority. The left declared
victory and demanded that Macron appoint a candidate of its choice as prime
minister.
The
president insisted at first that no one had won. Only after weeks in denial did
he acknowledge that his own centrist group, which finished second, had lost. He
has since sought to avoid the political consequences of that defeat by refusing
to appoint the NFP’s pick, little-known civil servant Lucie Castets. He tried
instead to build an improbable coalition stretching from the mainstream
conservatives to the moderate left, excluding what he calls the extremes – the
RN and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) – to perpetuate his
pro-business policies.
The
fundamental problem is that no other party had an interest in helping the
unpopular, lame-duck president complete his second term with dignity. Why risk
political capital acting as a life raft for drowning Macronism? Better to stick
to maximalist demands and avoid getting your hands dirty. Especially since the
next government will have to make spending cuts and raise taxes to plug a
yawning budget deficit that has got France into trouble with the EU.
Besides,
most politicians are already fixated on the next elections, the municipals in
2026 and above all the presidential race in 2027, or perhaps sooner. Macron’s
prolonged delay in naming a prime minister has fuelled speculation, denied by
his staff, that he might have to resign before the end of his term. His former
prime minister, Édouard Philippe, was first out of the starting blocks this
week, declaring his candidacy for the presidency, whenever the election
happens.
Torn between
appointing a centre-left prime minister who might have reversed his flagship
pension reform and a centre-right premier who might not survive a censure
motion, Macron has chosen to put himself in the hands of the right, and of the
RN. He hopes this will preserve his legacy of economic policies that have drawn
record foreign investment and brought down unemployment, but infuriated trade
unions and many ordinary French people.
The
conservative LR – or what is left of the once-mighty Gaullist party after its
leader, Éric Ciotti, and a small band of allies teamed up with the RN in June –
has sought to assert its independence. LR presidential hopeful Laurent Wauquiez
initially ruled out entering a coalition or serving in government under Macron.
Whether Les Républicains will join a Barnier administration, as advocated by
former president Nicolas Sarkozy, remains to be seen.
The
Socialists, Greens and Communists are clinging so far to their alliance with
LFI, not out of any love for the tempestuous Mélenchon, but because they are
terrified of losing their town hall power bases if they break up now. So they
are all likely to vote against Barnier and remain firmly in opposition.
The
Socialist party is still recovering from a near-death experience after former
president François Hollande embraced supply-side economics and labour market
reform, and voters deserted them. Their last two presidential candidates,
Benoît Hamon and Anne Hidalgo, scored 6.4% and 1.8% respectively. Few want to
go back down that road.
Unlike
Italy, France has no tradition of a “technical” government of non-party senior
civil servants, central bankers or elder statespersons such as Mario Monti or
Mario Draghi, who do the dirty work of enacting necessary but unpopular reforms
before yielding to elected politicians. Some see Barnier as that kind of
figure, even though he is a career politician who has remained faithful to the
Gaullist movement even when it turned more Eurosceptic.
The Brexit
negotiator, who managed to build and retain a consensus of the 27 EU countries
throughout the tense negotiations with the UK, commands wider respect in the
political class and with the electorate. But Macron only turned to him as a
last resort after exploring two more high-profile alternatives.
On the
centre-left, Bernard Cazeneuve, a firm-handed former Socialist interior
minister and prime minister under Hollande’s presidency, known for being cool
under pressure and his lawyerly courtesy, appears to have been too demanding on
policy change. He had criticised Macron’s fiercely contested pensions reform
that raised the retirement age to 64 from 62 and an immigration law, since
gutted by the constitutional council, that sought to discriminate against
foreigners in welfare entitlement.
On the
centre-right, Xavier Bertrand, president of the northern Hauts-de-France
region, who was health and social affairs minister under Sarkozy, appears to
have been vetoed by the RN, which sees him as a hostile rival in its northern
fiefdoms.
Macron may
have saved his pension reform by appointing Barnier, but he has put his
political survival in the hands of Le Pen, who can show statesmanship by
abstaining to let a tough budget pass, then pull the plug on the government
when conditions are most favourable for her presidential bid.
Barnier
looks like Macron’s last card to preserve his legacy, in the hope that
something turns up between now and 2027 to rescue the political centre. Don’t
count on it.
Paul Taylor
is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
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