France’s Post-Olympics Political Crisis

By Jen Kirby | September 5, 2024 | 9:20am

Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Elections France

After an Olympics truce and weeks of political deadlock, President Emmanuel Macron has finally chosen a prime minister to lead a deeply divided National Assembly.

The job went to the late-breaking front-runner, former French politician and European commissioner Michel Barnier, who is a member of the conservative Les Républicains. He tried and failed to become the party’s 2022 presidential candidate, lurching to the right on immigration in his bid to do so. But he shares Macron’s pro-European worldview, and he was Europe’s chief Brexit negotiator, so he is a man intimately familiar with intractable politics and thankless jobs. Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally, or RN) has signaled it might be willing to accept a Barnier-led government.

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So Macron, after weeks of pressure, found his guy. But Barnier’s appointment is not a guarantee of stability – and it is likely far from the end of France’s political tumult.

Just a quick recap: A political lifetime ago, otherwise known as earlier this summer, France voted for its 577-member National Assembly, after Macron called a shock snap election. At first, Macron’s gamble risked putting Le Pen’s National Rally in power, as it led after the first round of voting. But a new, broad left-wing alliance known as the Nouveau Front Populaire (New Popular Front, or NFP) and centrist parties largely sought to make this a two-way race between democracy and extremism, and called on the French public to vote tactically: anyone but the far-right. This “republican front” succeeded, denying the National Rally victory and knocking them into third place, though the National Rally still grew its numbers in parliament.

But the election result also delivered an extraordinarily divided parliament, with no clear governing majority. The left-wing New Popular Front won, but barely. Macron’s centrist coalition came in second, but it also lost the most seats. Some presidents might take this as a rebuke of their leadership, but they are not, apparently, Macron, who insisted that ”no one won” the election.

That left France at an impasse. Such chaos is not exactly ideal when you’ve paid a few billion to show off your country to the world for a few weeks. So Macron declared a truce, keeping the current government in place, and promising to deal with the crisis the French way: after summer vacation. ”I have chosen stability,” Macron said in late-July. ”It’s clear that, until mid-August, we’re not in a position to change things because we’d create disorder.”

Which brings us to the predicament France has faced for weeks: no prime minister and no coalition with a clear governing mandate, ideological and political divisions between and within those coalitions, and one weakened president still trying to control the show. On Thursday, Macron tried to break this stalemate by choosing Barnier. But now Barnier must form a government that can survive and get a budget passed ahead of a rapidly approaching October deadline. But it’s still far from an actual fix to the country’s political mess.

Macron-Managing the National Assembly (Sorry, Sorry)

France’s current disarray was not unforeseen given the outcome of the parliamentary vote. Unlike a lot of other European countries used to complicated coalition negotiations, that’s not really France’s thing — the country doesn’t have a playbook for this. “Cohabitation” governments – where the president and prime minister come from opposing parties – have occurred. But in those cases, the party in the National Assembly had an absolute majority so the result was clear. That was not what happened here.

“It’s a matter of finding a figure, a prime minister, who could work with all the parties and not be censored immediately by the opposition – so someone who could appeal to the moderates on the center left, as well as the center-right, as well as the right, maybe also the far-right, which is big in parliament now,” said Philippe Marlière, professor of French and European Politics at University College London, who spoke to Splinter before Barnier’s appointment.

Shortly after the July 7th election, Macron wrote a letter to the country, calling on the political parties to build a mainstream coalition, asking all those “that identify with republican institutions, rule of law, parliamentarianism, a pro-European stance and French independence to have a sincere, loyal dialogue to build a solid – necessarily plural – majority for the country.”

The letter was a rebuke against the far-right, but was also seen as a dig against the left-wing La France Insoumise, or France Unbowed (LFI). France Unbowed is the largest party in the leftist New Popular Front, and Macron has falsely equated it with the far-right in the past. The NFP rejected Macron’s overall stance, insisting that it won the most seats, and so should get to pick the prime minister. Some of this was political posturing; the NFP alliance did secure the most deputies, but only 182 – far off the 289 needed for an absolute majority. At the same time, Macron’s early proposal looked less like an olive branch to the NFP, and more like an effort to break up or altogether exclude the left-wing coalition and their political program.

The New Popular Front did select a prime minister: a 37-year-old Paris civil servant and economist Lucie Castets. She had ties to the center-left Socialist Party, as well as to progressive activism, and her technocratic background bolstered her consensus-candidate appeal. But Macron refused to appoint her, saying that an NFP-led government would immediately fall apart amid a no-confidence vote. He needed to seek “institutional stability.”

To be fair to Macron, that’s true – there likely weren’t enough votes in the National Assembly for a left-wing-led government to survive. But it’s also clear that Macron wasn’t likely to embrace a candidate with Castets’s ideological profile.

“Had he appointed Lucie Castets, the proposed PM of the left-wing coalition (Nouveau Front Populaire), he could have let parliament do the job of bringing her government down (which it surely would have),” Emile Chabal, professor of Contemporary History at the University of Edinburgh, wrote in an email before Barnier’s appointment. “However, he refused to nominate her, so it means he has to find a consensus candidate. This is more-or-less impossible in the current political configuration.”

Barnier Has the Gig. What’s Next?

In recent days, a bunch of possible prime ministerial candidates – a little-known civil servant, former ministers brought out of retirement – emerged. But just as quickly, their stars faded because of potential opposition from one or more camps in parliament.

Barnier apparently pulled into first late Wednesday. By Thursday, the Élysée Palace announced Barnier had been “tasked with forming a unifying government to serve the country and the French.” Barnier has the elder statesman credentials, and at 73, he isn’t seen as a serious threat to other politicians’ ambitions. His party, Les Républicains, came in fourth in the most recent elections, so Barnier’s appointment is quite a swing for their fortunes. And Barnier had the most important job qualification for Macron: not unraveling the president’s agenda.

This is just the beginning for Barnier. He has to win enough support – or at least not face active resistance – to form a government. In this, the far-right National Rally is likely going to be the kingmaker. RN has indicated they’re open to him, though the party is playing coy right now. Le Pen said they would wait to hear his policy speech before making any decisions.

Meanwhile, the left-wing alliance is furious about all this, as the selection of the conservative Barnier ices the bloc out. On X, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the leftist France Unbowed, accused Macron of stealing “the election from the French people.” Mélenchon probably wouldn’t have accepted any of Macron’s picks, but even more moderate members of the alliance blasted Macron. Olivier Fauvre, the center-left Socialist leader, wrote on X that the “democratic denial has reached its apogee: a prime minister from the party that came fourth and didn’t even take part in the republican front. We’re entering a regime crisis.”

This is the dilemma Macron put himself in: he could have let the National Assembly work it out, including letting a left-wing government fail on its own, as it seemed likely it would. Instead, he intervened, seeking “institutional stability,” but on his terms.

Those terms meant someone who would not counter his pro-business agenda and unpopular pension reform – positions a figure like Castets, or anyone on the left, would probably take. And Macron’s apparent skepticism of the left means he may ultimately need to rely on the far-right to maintain a government. This is the very same National Rally that Macron has decried (rightfully) as a threat to democracy. They may be the power brokers in this new parliament.

At the same time, no one, not even Macron’s own coalition, is eager to waste too much political capital on a dysfunctional, deadlocked parliament that still may be so unworkable Macron has to call new elections, even if they are unlikely to change the result. Parties and politicians want to stay out of this mess as much as possible to preserve their own ambitions. “It’s hard to judge what kinds of political reconfigurations are emerging. Everyone is biding their time, with an eye on the big prize, which is the presidential election of 2027, when Macron will not be able to stand,” Chabal said. “This opens a raft of possibilities, and it could make any government or new elections until then feel temporary and tense.”

The quagmire is such that some believe Macron might not even make it to the end of his term. Macron’s first prime minister, the center-right Edouard Philippe, launched his presidential bid this week, an interesting move to pull while his former boss is floundering. Politico reported that party officials suggest Philippe is preparing for a campaign as early as 2025.

Little about Macron suggests he’d step aside – but hey, crazy things do happen. Even so, it may not be a solution to the chaos that ails France. Polls suggest Le Pen could prevail in a presidential contest.

A Barnier-led minority government hanging on tenuous compromise may still be the likely end result of this drama. Any government, as Marliere said: “will be messy. It won’t be easy.”

Whatever the result, France’s unprecedented political situation looks like another warning signal for democracies. The fragmentation in France’s parliament will make governing very difficult, further frustrating a public disillusioned and distrustful of politicians and institutions. Macron was a beneficiary of this when he first ran for president, breaking the established parties on the center-left and center-right. Now those fractures have dragged down his presidency and his movement. All of this pushes France into an uncertain political future, one that is echoing across Europe and the world.