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.