By R.W. Johnson
France is on the edge of a political precipice. A great showdown is due on September 8, after which the country is unlikely to have a functional government.
The current crisis really goes back to June 2024 when President Macron unwisely called an election in the hope of puncturing the bubble of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, then riding high in the polls. This signally failed to work: on the election’s first round the RN came far ahead of all other parties with over ten million votes. On the second round the parties of the centre and left collaborated to try to shut the RN out.
This worked in that the RN won only 142 seats against the Popular Front (Left)’s 180 and Macron’s Ensemble party which won 159 seats – but that meant that the country was left with no obvious governing majority. After protracted negotiations, Macron appointed Michel Barnier as head of a caretaker Centrist government, with some degree of co-operation from the Socialists (who form part of the Popular Front).
Barnier soldiered through to December 2024, but his government then fell. Macron’s sole real achievement under that parliament had been to amend the pensionable age from 62 to 64, which had provoked enormous resistance both on the Left and Right. Constitutionally Macron was unable to call another election until a year after the last one, so instead he appointed his close collaborator, Francois Bayrou, to head another minority government. Bayrou has not had an easy time, and was even pushed into saying he would consider revising the pensionable age back to 62. That would have opened a Pandora’s Box of troubles, and it has not happened.
Bayrou’s government has faced the same fiscal crisis as its predecessor. France enjoys extremely generous social benefits, and despite its low defence spending, its budget deficit has never met the EU’s 3% of GDP target. Last year the budget deficit was 5.8% of GDP, and it is a matter of great urgency to bring that figure down. Accordingly, Bayrou had aimed at bringing the 2025 figure down to 5.4% and the 2026 figure to 4.6%. To that effect he has proposed a budget including spending cuts and tax increases of 44 billion Euros, with two public holidays abolished, and pensions and other welfare payments frozen for a year.
The problem is that the French electorate is in denial. When Macron had insisted that it was essential to raise the pensionable age, he was able to show graphs and tables illustrating the fact that if these belated changes were not made, the whole pension system would shortly collapse. This had no effect either on the Right or Left: there were furious assertions that the low retirement age was a sacred social right and must not be touched. The fact that other EU countries have much higher retirement ages – in some cases as high as 70 – and that a rising retirement age was an inevitable result of rising life expectancy were simply dismissed out of hand. In effect, the government was just told that it must “find the money”.
Similarly, Bayrou’s proposed budget was met with uproar and furious threats of a no confidence vote by both Left and Right. However, after consulting Macron, Bayrou has pre-empted them by announcing that he will put down a confidence vote on September 8. This is apparently suicidal: between them the RN and Popular Front have 312 seats in parliament out of a total of 577 – an easy majority if they vote together.
It is assumed that Bayrou will invoke Article 49 (3) of the constitution. Under that provision, if a prime minister puts down a motion of confidence, that motion passes automatically and without a vote unless the Opposition positively votes it down. (De Gaulle, who wrote the constitution, wanted to eliminate the Fourth Republic games whereby politicians could bring down a government by artful use of abstentions, thus evading responsibility.) But with both the Popular Front and Le Pen publicly committed to a No vote, the outcome already looks certain.
French government bonds and the stock market both fell heavily on the news. But the question in every mind is, what is Macron’s calculation? Already the finance minister, Eric Lombard, has thrown a curve ball by pointing out that if the election does not produce a workable government, there could be a financial collapse, which would force the IMF to step in. Everyone knows that would mean draconian cuts, privatisations and tax increases – a real financial purge, in other words. In effect, the electorate is being warned that if they wish to avoid that horror, the only way is to elect a moderate centrist majority which would work towards fiscal stability by more moderate means.
What threatens, in other words, is a possibly terminal crisis of the Fifth Republic. This Republic was born essentially because the Algerian war had produced an insoluble crisis: the army had revolted and was poised to launch an invasion of Paris from Algeria in 1958 when De Gaulle came to power, restored calm and wrote a new constitution. He survived other army revolts and many assassination attempts, and later the May Events of 1968, but bequeathed a stable and successful political system to his heirs, a system which has now lasted 67 years.
The polls suggest that an election now would probably re-produce a parliament with no working majority, though it is possible that opinions could change as the nature of the present crisis is borne in on the electorate. It is assumed on all sides that the RN and the Popular Front could not work together. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the most prominent leader of the Popular Front, would undoubtedly demand a Popular Front government because it is the biggest party, but that would cut no ice with anyone else.
The formal responsibility would sit with Macron. He would either have to decide on a fresh election, or he could name a new prime minister whose job it would be to put together a new government. Early suggestions are that he would again nominate another centrist to head a caretaker minority government. But Macron is emphatic that any government must deal with the fiscal crisis by pushing through an austerity budget very much like the package of measures that Bayrou has just presented – and both the RN and Popular Front are vowing that they would simply vote that down again, so the current crisis would be re-created. In which case no government could be formed and France would drift, rudderless.
In theory Macron could then resign as president, forcing a new presidential election. The polls show that 67% of voters want that – but Macron would be loath to do that, not only because he would not want his presidency to end in such obvious failure, but because Marine Le Pen is still the most popular presidential challenger. True, she is currently blocked from standing by the courts (though her case is under appeal) but to have the leading presidential contender ruled out by a hotly contested legal finding would only create a great deal more trouble. That is, after all, the sort of thing that happens in African banana republics. Yet it was Macron’s determination that Le Pen should not succeed him as president which led him to call last year’s disastrous snap election.
So it would appear that all the exits from this crisis are blocked. How did France reach such a denouement? By, apparently, an eminently reasonable route. When Macron first appeared on the national scene, he argued that France was sick of the alternation of Right and Left, and that ordinary, sensible people wanted a government of the centre. Moreover, people had had enough of crafty politicians like Mitterrand and Chirac: it would be better to have someone with real managerial expertise – like himself. A brilliant young enarque (a graduate of the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration), Macron had been a highly paid Rothschilds banker before becoming France’s youngest ever president, aged 39, after the briefest possible political career.
At first everything went swimmingly. Macron was easily elected and won a majority for his new centrist party in the subsequent election, surfing on his own large presidential following. But the centre in France has always been a thing of shreds and patches, of local notables with a personal following but with no real party structure and no well-organised mass membership. All it really had going for it was Macron’s personal popularity.
And that soon declined. Mitterrand and Chirac both had very sensitive political antennae, and had well organised mass parties behind them. They knew that the French have to be charmed and wooed in order to get major changes through, and that there were certain sacred objects and symbols which could never be touched. They would both have tried to avoid raising the retirement age, knowing how tightly the French cling to their “acquired social rights” – but if it had to be done they would have tried to cloak it in ultra-patriotic clothing, probably adding sweeteners for those who voluntarily worked beyond retirement age. As for abolishing two public holidays, they would have avoided that at all costs, for the symbolism of depriving people of their leisure is politically too costly. Instead they would have found something more arcane which could be quietly cut in a dark corner.
Such wiles and cunning were not for Macron. Luxuriating in the great powers of the French presidency, he unwisely and publicly mused about his “Jupiterian” powers, invoking the king of the Roman gods. He acted in classic managerial style, identifying problems and going straight at them, with no surrounding artifice. This was not at all what his electorate was accustomed to, and he quickly gained a reputation for “arrogance” and a lack of feeling. The fact was that he had no real understanding of French political culture and the political wiles necessary to negotiate it. He was not really a politician.
As the going got tougher he, like any Fifth Republican president, needed his party more – but his party was far too slight and artificial a creation to be much use. Moreover, to build the centre he had pulled in moderate elements from the old Gaullists on the right and the Socialists on the left. By thus pulling away their centrist elements, he helped the far Left (Melenchon’s la France Insoumise) take over the left, and the far right (Le Pen) to take over the right. Macron had hoped that the centrists would become the dominant force on the French political scene, but instead he helped create the situation in which France is now dominated by the extreme right and extreme left. More experienced politicians can only grimace at the way Macron has achieved the exact opposite of what he was aiming for.
Instead what Macron faces is the probability of yet a third caretaker government since 2024, and no real solution to the fiscal crisis in sight. As the economy falters, Macron’s own popularity rating is likely to fall. For his own political mistakes seem likely to guarantee him a protracted period of political impotence, mocking his “Jupiterian” boasts. His current presidential term ends in May 2027. At that point Macron will still be only 49, and since there are no term limits on the French presidency he could theoretically run again, but it is far more likely that he will end his presidency in a greatly weakened and bedraggled state.
In 2022 Le Pen already won 41.45% of the second round vote – a record for the far right – but she could be even stronger by 2027 if indeed she manages to run. Macron’s denouement would be complete if he paves the way for a Le Pen presidency, but right now that looks only too possible.
FEATURED IMAGE: The Palais Bourdon, seat of the French National Assembly. (Wikimedia Commons)