December 20, 2024 - 10:00am
This year, the French have had four prime ministers, the latest being the veteran centrist François Bayrou. Having replaced Michel Barnier only last week, Bayrou might have expected a period of grace. Instead he finds himself at the centre of a raging controversy. The issue is his other job as mayor of Pau — a small city near the Pyrenees. Though it is common in France for national politicians to simultaneously serve as mayors, prime ministers typically relinquish the local role. But not Bayrou who, perhaps sensing that his days as PM are numbered, has declined to resign his mayoralty.
It didn’t take long for this to become a major problem. On Saturday, Cyclone Chido hit Mayotte, a French island territory in the Indian Ocean, devastating the island and killing 58 people. Despite its location, Mayotte is fully incorporated in France as an overseas department. As head of the French government, Bayrou should have flown out to offer support, but instead he flew back home to attend a council meeting in Pau.
The French public was less than impressed. An Ifop-Fiducial poll published yesterday found that 64% of the country is dissatisfied with Bayrou’s appointment as prime minister, while 67% expect him to face a censure motion in the National Assembly — just like the one that precipitated Barnier’s resignation.
In combination, the Left-wing and Right-wing opposition parties have a majority in the National Assembly and could, in theory, bring down President Emmanuel Macron’s prime ministers on a weekly basis. In practice, that would make France — and themselves — look ridiculous. Marine Le Pen in particular needs to watch her step. To have a chance of winning the 2027 presidential election, she must radiate responsibility. That’s why Bayrou’s disastrous debut is a big deal: it brings forward the moment at which Le Pen can strike without looking like a constitutional vandal.
French politics at the moment resembles No Exit, the Jean-Paul Sartre play in which three mutually antagonistic individuals are damned to spend an eternity together. The same could be said of the Leftist, centrist and Rightist blocs in the National Assembly: they can hurt one another, but for the foreseeable future there’s no way of breaking the deadlock.
What makes Macron’s personal torment all the worse is that he appears to have options. For instance, if Bayrou falls the President could appoint another centrist candidate — and, if necessary, another one after that. Eventually, that would get him to the minimum one-year interval at which the National Assembly could be dissolved again. Fresh elections would bring the hope that his allies might win a majority. Of course, that’s what he tried last year and it didn’t work. It’s very unlikely to work this year either.
A second option would be to appoint a prime minister from Marine Le Pen’s party — most likely Jordan Bardella. However, the original purpose of Macron’s political movement was to keep the populist Right out of power — so why would the establishment agree to a pact with the enemy?
Finally, Macron could resign, forcing an early presidential election. But guess who’s currently in pole position to win such a contest? The twist in the plot of No Exit is that one of the characters eventually finds an open door, but he cannot bring himself to use it. Macron must know how that feels. In France, hell is other politicians.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeAll paths lead to Le Pen, unless Macron goes for the 6eme republique. First we had coalitions trying to block the will of the people across Europe. That is now running out of runway. I am intrigued to know how far they will attempt to take this before the people rise. And rise they will if the anger readily expressed in private discourse is triggered.
The big issue in French politics is the pension reform. Obviously, this is an issue that cannot be handled by the French state any longer. Hence, it must be outsourced, and why not to the unions?
The unions would of course have to form a joint organization for deciding about entitlements and to run a distribution system. The role of such a new organization would be to decide upon pension ages for various categories as well as which entitlement different categories should hold.
The role of the French state would henceforth only be to decide the level of the contribution and to run the system collecting the money, i.e.to gather the sum of the contributions. This operation must be totally separated from the budget of the state.
The total amount gathered every year should then be handed over to the union run organization for the further distribution to the entitled.
Globalisation has made the graduate bourgeoisie rich in France, just as it has everywhere in the West. But the price paid by everyone else has been far too high. The question now is: can the situation be rectified without the violent destruction of the institutions that have stood guard over the process.
The answer, at least so far as France is concerned, seems to be ‘no’.
At this stage I’d suggest the populist Left is more of a danger than the populist Right. Melenchon is an unreconstructed Trotskyist who dreams of taking the country back to Mai 68.
Scylla and Charybdis?
Quite. And a nice “No Exit” analogy.
I suppose they might manage to find Le pen guilty of what others have done anyway, bang her up and pretend that Bordella doesn’t exist.
But the arrows point her or her party’s way, though she is hardly any answer, proposing left wing economic solutions to problems caused by left wing economics. But I’d like to see her win through. It might shake Europe out of it’s torpor, politically at least. Trump will have done something similar in the US by then, so it only leaves us in the UK to reject the managerialism we have become suffocated by.
Get rid of the position of prime minister. Absurd in a strong Presidency system.
The 5th Republic constitution is not a presidency system. In a presidency system, the executive does not depend on a majority in parliament.
The current French constitution insulates the president from parliament, which in France has historically been fractured. The primary scope of authority of the president is foreign policy, so French foreign policy is insulated from domestic politics (completely unlike the US, where the domestic politics tail wags the foreign policy dog).
The problem is not the French constitution, the problem is Macron’s refusal to bow to the will of voters.