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What’s going on with France’s government now the Olympics are over?

French president Emmanuel Macron may, possibly, be naming a new prime minister next week - here's the latest in the ongoing saga of the French government.

Published: 13 August 2024 16:33 CEST
Updated: 16 August 2024 13:15 CEST
What's going on with France's government now the Olympics are over?
France's President Emmanuel Macron may announce a new prime minister next week. Photo by Christophe SIMON / POOL / AFP

Over three weeks France – and much of the world – was busy being enthralled by the Paris Olympics. From the beautiful venues to the astonishing sporting feats and the general sense of joie de vivre, it was a very happy period.

But now the Olympics are over (although the Paralympics start soon) and France must again face its lack of a government.

What happened again?

In case a newly-acquired knowledge of the rules of competition skateboarding has caused you to forget, here’s a brief recap of where we were politically when the Games began at the end of July.

A parliamentary election, hastily called by Emmanuel Macron, resulted in an inconclusive result in which no party or group won a majority in the Assemblée nationale in the second round of voting on July 7th.

Instead three blocks emerged – the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) left alliance with 193, centrists including Macron’s party on 164 and the far-right Rassemblement National on 143. No party came even close to the 289 seats required for a majority. 

Things drifted for a while as it became obvious that not only did no party have a majority, but no-one had any immediate prospects of forming an alliance or coalition that would take them to the magic 289 seats.

On July 17th, Macron formally accepted the resignation of prime minister Gabriel Attal and his government, but asked them all to stay on in ‘caretaker’ roles until a new government could be created.

The caretaker government has been in power ever since – it can take decisions in case of emergency or urgent need, but has severely limited powers.

READ ALSO How does France’s caretaker government work?

Then what happened?

The Olympics started. Although no-one actually agreed to a political ‘truce’ the French public and French media seemed very happy to be distracted from this ongoing mess and instead focus on sport.

It helped that the Paris Olympics were a big success – the city looked gorgeous, French athletes won plenty and the whole country was in an unusually good mood.

But the politicians were still working behind the scenes, right?

There doesn’t seem to be much evidence of this. Most of the cabinet immediately decamped to the Games and were pictured cheering on French athletes and generally having fun.

Macron himself appears to have loved the Games – he attended multiple events, embraced French athletes and the closest he appears to have got to politics was attending the France-USA basketball final with the American ‘second gentleman’ Doug Emhoff. 

Meanwhile other ministers decamped to the seaside or the country for their traditional summer holidays.

The politicians of the leftist NFP continued to bang the drum for a new government, especially their eventual pick for prime minister Lucie Castets, who has been touring France introducing herself to the people and generally giving the vibe of a politician on the campaign trail.

So what now?

The Olympics are over and the Paralympics, while likely to be a fantastic sporting spectacle, probably won’t be accepted as an excuse to continue the drift.

Although the usual sleepy August spirit has seized much of the country, some politicians have returned to the fray – on Tuesday, Attal proposed to the various parties of the French parliament that they ‘build a legislative compromise’ with a left-to-right spectrum of parties, but excluding the far-right Rassemblement National and the far-left La France Insoumise.

This is basically what the Macronists were proposing before the Olympics, and it remains to be seen whether they will find enough (or any) parties willing to agree to join, and who could be acceptable to all parties as a candidate for prime minister. Meanwhile the NFP continues to insist that as the largest group it has the right to nominate a prime minister, the aforementioned Castets.

So who’s in charge?

Macron remains president, with the wide-ranging powers afforded to him by the French constitution, but when it comes to government it’s still in caretaker mode, with Attal as a caretaker PM with limited powers.

How will this go on for?

Well, the Constitution does not provide any kind of limit for how long a caretaker government can remain in place, nor does Macron have a constitutional deadline by which to name a prime minister.

However, Macron did announce on Friday that he would be holding a series of meetings with other group leaders on Friday, August 23rd after which he may, possibly, name a new prime minister.

This is not guaranteed, however and it’s possible that this could drag on until September.

One thing we do know – parliamentary elections are limited to once every 12 months, so there cannot be another one until June 2025.

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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: With Michel Barnier as PM, France is retreating to the 1950s

France faces a soaring budget deficit, painful financial choices and a deadlocked parliament. Into this chaos strolls the urbane figure of Michel Barnier as the new prime minister - John Lichfield asks whether he can steady the ship, or if he is doomed to be consigned to the footnotes of history.

Published: 10 September 2024 11:15 CEST
OPINION: With Michel Barnier as PM, France is retreating to the 1950s

Michel Barnier, France’s new Prime Minister, is a decent, talented man with the qualities and limitations of a politician from a different age.

He will head a coalition reminiscent of the ephemeral governments which ruled France in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Explained: France’s ‘fourth republic’ of the 1940s and 50s

He faces the most complex and potentially disastrous financial mess confronted by any French government since the war. He must operate without a majority, or even a stable minority, in a parliament divided between four mutually-detesting factions.

He has been mostly absent from front-line politics for the five years since he led the European Union’s Brexit negotiations with the UK.

When I look at or listen to Barnier, I am taken back to my childhood in the 1950s and 1960s. He is a Harold Macmillan or Pierre Mendes France who has strayed into the age of fake news, social media and professionally excitable 24-hour news shows.

He may be just the steady man that France needs; or he may be a foot-note waiting to happen,

Barnier became Prime Minister because Marine Le Pen told President Emmanuel Macron that she would not censure him immediately. Even some sensible voices on the Left claim that he is de facto “in alliance” with the Far Right. Not really. But Barnier will survive only if Le Pen believes that that his survival serves her personal and political interests.

This is a bizarre and dangerous situation two months after Le Pen’s Rassemblement National was rejected by two thirds of the nation in snap parliamentary election. It is arguably a situation of Macron’s making because he impetuously called an early election (but that election would have probably been forced on him this autumn anyway).

It is not a situation of Barnier’s choosing or of Macron’s choosing. The parliamentary arithmetic was decided by the people of France; the swing votes were, in effect, given to Le Pen by the Left.

The three-and-a-half-way split in the new Assembly – Left, Centre, Centre-Right and Far Right – meant that no camp could govern alone. Any new compromise government had to be supported by the Centre and at least tolerated by the Left or by the Far Right.

The Left was given a chance by Macron last week to have a left-tinged centrist government under the former Socialist PM, Bernard Cazeneuve. The Left-wing alliance Nouveau Front Poulaire, dominated by the all-or-nothing logic of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, refused.

It may be that Macron preferred things that way. Cazeneuve wanted to reverse or at least amend Macron’s flagship reforms of pensions and the labour market.

The parliamentary Left now threatens to bring down the Barnier government as soon as the Assembly meets on October 1st. It does not have the votes to do so (193 instead of the 289 needed for a censure motion) unless Marine Le Pen’s 142 far-right deputies join them.

In other words, the Left is de facto appealing for an alliance with Le Pen to remove a Barnier government, which it accuses of being in alliance with Le Pen.

Bad faith rules on the Left. Muddle and pessimism jostle in the Centre and Centre-right.

Barnier will be supported uneasily by Macron’s Centre, his own Centre-Right and a few independents. He has 228 votes at most in an Assembly with 577 seats.

He relies on Le Pen to stand aside in what may a long series of left-wing censure votes – especially on the painful 2025 budget. She says that she “may” do so as long as a Barnier government accommodates her views on immigration and a switch to proportional representation in future legislative elections.

She believes, for the present, that she will gain from seeming stateswoman-like and refusing to plunge the country into chaos. She risks being accused by the Left and by part of the Far Right of becoming another mainstream politician.

Her choices may be influenced by the fact that she goes on trial in Paris at the end of this month for allegedly stealing millions of Euros from the European Union by employing fake officials in the European Parliament. If convicted, she faces a five-year ban from public office

Does that make her more likely or less to give Barnier the time and latitude he needs to avoid a full-scale budget crisis half a century in the making?

Every time that she or her chieftains speak they give a different answer. Incoherence is the default position of the Rassemblement National. They will be confronted in the next few weeks with something they prefer to avoid – painful choices imposed by political reality.

A deficit-cutting draft budget for 2025 is supposed to be ready by Friday (September 13th) and presented to the Assembly when it meets on October 1st. The last government had been working on freezes and cuts to bring the deficit down to 4.1 percent of GDP next year, from 5.5 percent in 2023.  

The Left wants a higher tax and spend budget, deficit or no deficit; the Far Right wants, as usual, lower taxes and more spending; Barnier will insist on cuts but he has hinted that he is also ready to raise some taxes.

All bets have been muddled by a fall in tax income and a surge in local government spending in the first half of this year. Without emergency spending cuts of €16 billion, France will end this year with a 5.6 percent GDP deficit, instead of the 5.1 percent promised to the EU and debt ratings agencies.

Barnier, a footnote or a modest triumph? In all logic, he should fail. No recent French government has been asked to do so much with so little.

His slogging patience and determination defeated the lies and vague fantasies of the UK Brexiteers. They may not be enough to rescue France from its own illusions and evasions.

And yet and yet… I have a nagging feeling that the visitor from the past might succeed.

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