To nobody’s great surprise, the French government collapsed today, and President Emmanuel Macron will have to seek yet another new Prime Minister – his sixth since winning the presidency in 2017.
In June this year Macron called snap elections, trying to resolve a deadlocked National Assembly that had struggled to function ever since indecisive elections in 2022.
His gamble failed. This year’s elections produced an even more fragmented Assembly, and Macron made matters worse by his arrogant handling of the negotiations that followed.
One problem is that both Macron’s character and the character of French politics is designed to favour a strong (even arrogant) President, in contrast to Germany, where since 1945 the constitution has deliberately circumscribed central state power, and Chancellors almost always have to form coalitions – sometimes three-way coalitions.
The French are not used to that type of politics, and a constitution that vests considerable power in the President is almost designed to encourage him to defy parliament rather than work with it.
Logic dictated that Macron should have tried to split the left, and win over some leftish leaders who distrust the pro-Moscow Marxist Jean-Luc Mélenchon (who is almost as egotistical and divisive a figure as Macron himself).
Instead Macron tried to rely on a combination of his own Blair-style centrists, and the declining French conservative party now known as the Republicans, choosing one of the latter, Michel Barnier, as his fifth prime minister in seven years.
73-year-old Barnier (best known to H&D readers for his years as EU chief negotiator with the UK during the Brexit process from 2016-21) tried to impose Macron’s favoured policy of Anglo-American style austerity. This has now been decisively rejected both by the constellation of leftist parties led by Mélenchon, and by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National).
Yet under the French constitution, both Le Pen and Mélenchon will have to wait for their chance to appeal to voters. No fresh Assembly elections can be held until next July. Until then Macron has the power either to appoint a caretaker government which will use last year’s budget to continue paying the French state’s bills, or to attempt the almost impossible task of finding a new coalition that can command a majority in the Assembly to pass a new budget.
Unless Macron chooses to resign (or dies in office) he will remain President until April 2027 when (having completed two terms) he will be required to step down.
More than in most ‘democratic’ countries, it’s very difficult to predict the results of any Assembly election that would presumably be held next summer – partly because we have no idea how the left will organise itself, nor do we know how much of the conservative right will be prepared to ally with Le Pen.
One of the many difficulties is that Le Pen rejects the economic prescriptions preferred by most conservatives. On economic matters she is very much on the ‘left’, arguing for preservation of the traditionally generous French pension system and other protections for workers.
Some on the conservative ‘right’ would doubtless have preferred her rival Éric Zemmour, who was for a year or two allied to Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal and whose approach combined anti-immigration and anti-Islamist policies with more traditional conservative economics including drastic cuts in state spending.
But Zemmour (who also shares the pro-Putin outlook of the main far left leader Mélenchon) has seen his party collapse since 2022 and now seems to be an irrelevance.
Whatever else happens in 2025, it seems obvious that (for now) Marine Le Pen is the standard bearer for French nationalism. These Assembly elections might be her last chance. If she fails, then she will face pressure to step aside in favour of a new generation. If she succeeds, then she has the chance to claim the premiership (probably for her protégé Jordan Bardella) and then to claim the presidency herself in 2027.