After 50 days without a government, France is losing her head. What began as a historical curiosity has descended into a crisis. Not only is the current caretaker government unable to manage anything more than “ongoing affairs”, but the deadline for passing a budget is looming and the French are tiring of the summer’s political saga of choosing a prime minister. In a poll conducted at the end of July, 67% of adults felt that Emmanuel Macron’s decision to dissolve the National Assembly and call a snap election was a mistake. Since then, attitudes have hardened. Macron’s delaying tactics, and his snub to the Left in refusing its nomination of Lucie Castets for prime minister, has prompted a call for his impeachment led by the far-Left France Insoumise party.
Meanwhile, disenchantment with all the country’s political actors has set in. The French National Assembly, far from being seen as a defender of democracy against an autocratic president, is viewed just as negatively as the presidency. It is telling that in recent days Gabriel Attal, the current caretaker Prime Minister, has become a preferred choice for prime minister. It seems as if many in France would rather forget the whole sorry episode altogether and return to the status quo ante.
But political stability is now a luxury of the past. French politics has reached such an impasse that even the eventual nomination of a prime minister cannot overcome it. Calls for action abound but have little real chance of reaching fruition. Take La France Insoumise’s call for Macron’s impeachment. The movement, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has argued that Macron’s actions are profoundly anti-democratic, positioning themselves as defenders of French democracy. Their petition for impeachment has garnered many thousands of signatures, and they have called for mass protests to take place on Saturday.
And yet, Macron is highly unlikely to face impeachment. The motion is primarily a rhetorical device, as it is extremely difficult to pass under the rules of the Fifth Republic’s constitution. The France Insoumise has met the 10% threshold of MPs or senators required to support the motion for it be considered admissible by the relevant legislative committee. An attempt to impeach François Hollande in 2016, over claims that he had revealed state secrets in his discussions with journalists, reached this stage before being rejected. Should an impeachment motion be considered valid, it would then need a two-thirds majority in both legislative chambers — the parliament and the senate. There is little support for such a move outside of the France Insoumise, which means that it is almost impossible to conceive of it meeting the two-thirds requirement just in the National Assembly, let alone in the Senate where the LFI has no senators at all.
In the face of such hostility, Macron’s strategy has grown clearer. His hard veto of Left-candidate Lucie Castets revealed his determination not to appoint a prime minister committed to undoing his own legislative achievements. His pension reforms appear particularly dear to him.
One serious contender for prime minister is Bernard Cazeneuve, who was Macron’s one-time political confidant when he was a rising star in Hollande’s government and Cazeneuve was interior minister. The two men, who reputedly have the same taste in films (Michel Audiard’s classics) and would get together for late evening chats over whisky, fell out after Macron launched En Marche. In doing so, Macron fulminated against the very political establishment that Cazeneuve incarnated after Hollande made him prime minister in December 2016. Yet despite being a well-known figure, Cazeneuve lacks support within the New Popular Front alliance, most notably the France Insoumise. And, perhaps fatally, he seems not to be in favour of maintaining Macron’s pension reforms.
By contrast, Xavier Bertrand, a centre-right hopeful, would be unlikely to endanger any of Macron’s programme were he to become prime minister. Bertrand has an ambivalent relationship with the centre-right party, Les Républicains. His political career reached its apogee under Nicolas Sarkozy but in 2022 he had seemed likely to win the centre-right nomination for the presidential election. In his party’s primary, however, Bertrand came far behind other contenders, prompting him to leave the party. It is perhaps the party’s subsequent disaster in the 2022 election — in which its candidate, Valérie Pécresse, failed to win more than 5% of the votes, putting the party into serious financial difficulty — that explains Bertrand’s political survival. When the centre-right party leader, Eric Ciotti, decided to strike an alliance with the far-Right for the legislative elections of 2024, putting him at odds with all other leading figures in his own party, Les Républicains were weakened even more. Meanwhile, Bertrand languished in the political wilderness — a period which may have dented his presidential ambitions. He appears unlikely to challenge Macron’s pension policies.
The problem with any nomination is that it needs support from other parties in the National Assembly in order to produce a stable government. This was the difficulty posed by Lucie Castets: in promising to deliver on the New Popular Front’s programme, she was unlikely to secure the support of those parties to the right of the NPF, such as Macron’s Ensemble group, which she would need to pass any legislation. Cazeneuve, by contrast, is more amenable to Macron’s MPs but lacks support from the far-Left. His nomination would succeed only by breaking up the New Popular Front. Bertrand faces a similar difficulty on the Right, though his chances look rather better.
To many, the job itself is a poisoned chalice. Those belonging to Les Républicains with presidential ambitions for 2027, most notably Laurent Wauquiez, are wary of joining the government. They do not wish to attach themselves to a sinking Macronist ship, which will have a deleterious effect on their own political hopes. Bertrand is unusual in that he seems willing to accept the job, but he is also likely to face opposition from the far-Right, which has said it would put forward a motion of censure should Bertrand ever form a government. It is unlikely, however, that such a motion could bring the administration down, requiring as it does an absolute majority in the chamber.
In declaring victory on the evening of the 7 July, then, the French Left was wildly unrealistic. It simply did not have enough seats in the National Assembly to be able to form a government and realise its programme. Should this stalemate continue, Macron may well turn instead towards a non-political figure, someone able to lead a technocratic government that might win the approbation of the parties in the National Assembly. One name that has emerged in this respect is Thierry Beaudet, president of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council, a third pillar of government in France that represents those collective interests that sit in the space between citizens and the state, such as organised labour, business owners and farmers. This would be a curious choice for Macron given his past denunciation of these interests as self-serving and self-interested.
In the meantime, the longer the crisis goes on, the more it weakens Jupiter himself. Divided on everything else, Parliament is unlikely to impeach the President. But should the impasse continue for much longer, the howls for Macron’s resignation will begin.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/