Straight to the point

As soon as the dust settled around Michel Barnier’s surprise nomination as French Prime Minister, the choice was met with something like grudging admiration. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the President realised an unexpected coup. But in recent days attitudes seem to be changing. Barnier has been unable to choose his ministers, and his support amongst the parliamentary groups is starting to fray. Meanwhile, Barnier’s suggestion that he may need to raise taxes has been met with consternation. Looking at the causes and consequences of Macron’s appointment, it is starting to look less like a clever move than a reckless gamble.

After losing the legislative elections, it seemed that Macron would be forced to nominate a Prime Minister from the Left. After all, the Left alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), won 193 seats, compared with the 166 of Macron’s Ensemble, the 142 of the far-Right Rassemblement National (RN), and the mere 47 picked up by the centre-right Républicains (LR). Given the radical content of the NFP’s programme and how likely it would be to row back on Macron’s controversial pension reforms, a Left-wing Prime Minister would have been a difficult pill for the President to swallow.

By waiting until after the Olympics, and riding it out through the August sunshine, Macron was able to let the sense of electoral defeat dissipate. Capitalising on the divisions within the National Assembly, where no single party or group commanded a majority, Macron argued that he would only nominate a Prime Minister that would escape a vote of no confidence. The Left-wing candidate, Lucie Castets, was most likely to be voted down by her opponents, giving Macron a reason to refuse her appointment. Determined to find someone who would double-down on his legislative achievements, Macron turned towards the Right. His interest in Xavier Bertrand, however, was a red rag to the RN: Bertrand, as President of the Hauts de France region, has very often clashed with Marine Le Pen. She made it very clear to Macron that a Bertrand-led government would not last long. Barnier, by contrast, was far more amenable to the far Right. On 5 September, very quickly after his name appeared out of nowhere, Barnier was sworn in as Prime Minister.

Superficially at least, Macron has been able to shore up his own policies while also stealing the premiership from under the noses of the Left. The response within the NFP has been vitriolic. As one Le Monde headline put it, “The Left misses out on Matignon, the Parti Socialiste (PS) tears itself apart.” At issue here is the candidature of socialist heavyweight and former Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. On 19 August, Macron telephoned Cazeneuve, after weeks of speculation about his possible nomination. Days later, at the PS’s summer conference, Cazeneuve was the subject of strong disagreements: the Left alliance remained committed to Castets, but others voiced their support for Cazeneuve and criticised Olivier Faure, the leader of the PS, for doggedly seeking an alliance with the far-left France Insoumise. By the beginning of September, it was clear that Cazeneuve did not have the support of his own party and Macron turned elsewhere.

Since then, Faure has been accused of torpedoing Cazeneuve’s nomination out of self-interest. The same has been said of former President, François Hollande, who is now back in Parliament as an MP. Neither Faure nor Hollande wanted a heavyweight Left-wing Prime Minister because it would detract from their own ambition to be at the centre of things. Macron’s move has thus provoked some blood-spilling within the Left alliance.

But Barnier’s nomination is symptomatic of a deep crisis not only on the Left but also within Macronism. The fact that the new Prime Minister is struggling to put a government together should not be surprising, and for at least three reasons.

The first is that Macron’s decision-making around the nomination was clearly oriented towards protecting his policies from being reversed by the Left. And this could only be guaranteed by a Right-wing Prime Minister — even the more moderate Cazeneuve gave indications that he might reverse some of Macron’s reforms. As a result, it is no longer possible to think of Macronism as an ideologically ecumenical — or post-ideological — movement, which is precisely what distinguished Macronism in its beginnings from its opponents. Macron explicitly sought to distance himself from the language of Left and Right and relied heavily on figures from both sides when putting together Prime Ministers and governments. Over the years, however, this has proven more and more difficult. The Left, in particular, has increasingly seen Macronism as just another term for the Right, and its politicians like Gérard Collomb, who used to support Macron, have refused to serve under him. Collomb, prominent within the PS, resigned as Minister of the Interior by the end of 2018. He’d had enough of the haughty and uncompromising manner of the young President.

The second reason is that Macron’s choice of Barnier is evidence that his own centrist political movement is giving way to a return of the centre-right in French politics. In their eyes, he stole an election, in 2017, which should have been won by their candidate, François Fillon. And he went on to steal their policies, most notably the cause of pension reform, as well as their politicians, such as Édouard Philippe and Rachida Dati. The result for the centre-right was catastrophic in electoral terms: while in 2017, Fillon was only fractionally behind Le Pen in the first round of the presidential election, five years later, their candidate, Valérie Pécresse, was unable to win even 5% of the vote. The nomination saga and the eventual choice of Barnier tells a different story. In order to avoid the Left, Macron has had to ally his movement to the centre-right in a way that has amplified the latter enormously. With only a relatively small number of deputies, the centre-right appears as if it will dominate the government. For some centre-right leaders, this all amounts to a slow take-over of Macronism, a reverse of what has occurred over the last seven years. It is for this exact reason that Gabriel Attal and Macron’s MPs in the National Assembly, are beginning to turn against Barnier, realising that they are unlikely to be appointed to any of the most important ministerial posts.

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The third reason is to do with Barnier himself. Whereas Attal was the youngest Prime Minister in the history of the Fifth Republic, and someone so close to Macron that he was referred to as “baby Macron”, Barnier is a politician unquestionably and unequivocally from the centre-right Gaullist tradition. He joined the Gaullist party, Union des Démocrates pour la République, in 1965 and remained a member through all of its incarnations from Chirac’s Rassemblement pour la République to LR today.

Barnier is a career politician of the old sort, one whose career spans the local politics of his native Savoie region and reaches all the way to seven ministerial positions starting in 1993, two appointments as European Commissioner and finally leading the EU-UK Brexit negotiations. Indeed, it is quite possible that Barnier is better known in the UK as the EU’s negotiator than he is in France. The contrast between Barnier and the sort of political figure that we associate with Macron’s En Marche movement could not be greater. His methodical and plodding approach, that leaves nothing to chance, is very far removed from Macron’s leadership style that relies heavily on instinct and a firm belief in his own brilliance. Barnier incarnates an older form of politics which Macron had promised to destroy but, in the end, seemed to resurrect.

By choosing Barnier, Macron might have unleashed conflict within the Left, but he has displayed his own desperation and heralded the steady collapse of his political movement. By the time the next presidential elections come around in 2027, there might be nothing left of Macronism at all.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/