Can
Macron’s new PM unite France’s moderates? Marine Le Pen looms if he fails
Paul Taylor
François
Bayrou faces the same budgetary headache as Michel Barnier – but the
parliamentary equation has changed
Mon 16 Dec
2024 11.09 CET
The latest
attempt to resolve France’s political and financial crisis might be dubbed
“back to the future”.
The new
prime minister, François Bayrou, was minister of education when Emmanuel Macron
was still a schoolboy. The 73-year-old centrist, whom the president reluctantly
appointed on Friday after days of closed-door wrangling after the fall of
Michel Barnier’s short-lived government, was a vital ally and consigliere to
the young Macron when he dynamited France’s political system in 2017 to win the
presidency at the tender age of 39.
Macron
believed he had consigned the old political class and the left-right divide to
history – calling it “le monde d’avant” (the world before). Now both have
returned to bite the lame-duck president in the behind. Bayrou effectively
forced a hesitant Macron to appoint him, according to insider accounts, by
threatening to pull his MoDem party out of the president’s Ensemble (Together)
alliance otherwise.
Macron’s
chances of serving out his own term till 2027 and preventing hard right
anti-immigration leader Marine Le Pen from succeeding him in the Élysée Palace
hinge on the success of this gambit.
Bayrou was
recalled in a second attempt to break a parliamentary deadlock that defeated
Barnier and has left France without a budget and in the firing line of credit
ratings agencies over its mounting debt and chronic deficit. Moody’s downgraded
France’s sovereign rating on the day Bayrou took over the Hotel Matignon office
from the former Brexit negotiator.
With
financial pressure and public discontent mounting, can Bayrou do any better
than the hapless Barnier? The answer depends on his ability to persuade both
the centre-left Socialist party (PS) and the conservative Republicans (LR) to
refrain from toppling his government, giving him at least a breathing space to
show some results.
Many
commentators, especially on the left, rushed to dismiss Bayrou’s nomination as
a “same old, same old” attempt by Macron to salvage his liberal legacy by
nominating someone he could trust not to scrap his pension reform of raising
the retirement age from 62 to 64, or reverse his tax cuts for wealth creators.
But the
political equation has changed since the start of December, when an unnatural,
ad hoc alliance of Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and the leftwing New Popular
Front (NPF), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical left France Unbowed (LFI),
brought down Barnier’s government over his plan to defer an inflation catch-up
for pensioners.
The
Socialist leader, Olivier Faure, realised that many Socialist supporters didn’t
approve of the PS voting with the “extremes” on the censure motion, and think
the party should break with LFI and behave more constructively as a responsible
“governing left”. Facing internal party challenges, he agreed to talks with
Macron and said the PS was ready to compromise on the basis of “reciprocal
concessions”. The Greens, too, said they were open to a non-aggression pact if
the new premier respected certain conditions, notably refraining from using a
constitutional device to force laws through parliament without a vote.
Bayrou, a
farmer’s son who has a more pronounced social conscience than Macron or
Barnier, could use this opening to build a government of old hands from the
centre-left to the centre-right, even if that means dropping some of Barnier’s
spending cuts. In his first statement on taking office, the new premier, who
has remained rooted in the rural south-west, denounced what he called the
“glass ceiling” that cut France’s elites off from ordinary people, and promised
to restore a meritocracy in which hard work is rewarded.
Political
sources say he is likely to keep the conservative interior minister, Bruno
Retailleau, who has built a blunt-speaking “tough on crime, tough on illegal
migration” profile in his three months in office. But speculation is rife that
Bayrou will try to bring in political heavyweights from past administrations to
replace some of the second-rank politicians in Barnier’s fallen government.
To please
the Socialists and Greens – but also Le Pen’s RN – he may promise a bill to
introduce proportional representation in legislative elections before the next
National Assembly is elected. That would align France with most other
continental democracies, where government by coalition is the norm. It would
free the PS and Greens from having to rely on LFI votes to win constituency
run-offs under the current two-round system. But it would also mean a weaker,
more unstable executive than the highly vertical system that has been in place
since Charles de Gaulle instituted the Fifth Republic in 1958.
Fundamentally,
the French are struggling with the same equation of political instability and
fiscal squeeze as many other ageing European societies with little economic
growth, where politicians can’t agree on spending cuts that hurt their voters.
Except, France already had the highest tax take and public spending as a
proportion of national income of any EU country before Macron precipitated the
political crisis by dissolving parliament in June.
Unless
Bayrou can build a minimal consensus of parties from the centre-right to the
centre-left on socially balanced solutions to curb the budget deficit and
initiate one or two popular reforms, the latest episode in France’s political
drama will only fuel Le Pen’s chances of winning power. Bayrou himself noted on
Friday that he was facing a “Himalayan” task. For once that may not have been
hype.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the
European Policy Centre
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