On the 21st of September, two and a half months after the legislative elections in which the left-wing alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), came out on top, a new government was finally announced in France. Under the French system, legislative elections are traditionally immediately followed by the President appointing a candidate from the most popular party or alliance to the post of Prime Minister. This candidate is then responsible for forming a new government. Yet among the 41 new ministers, not a single NFP politician can be found.
When, in June, President Emmanuel Macron surprised the nation by triggering legislative elections, he claimed to be motivated by the desire to give the people of France a voice in the aftermath of a European Election which saw Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party win by a landslide.
In reality, the increasingly unpopular President was most likely searching for ways to shore up his own power. European elections have traditionally been seen as ‘second-order elections’, in which electors support parties they would not vote for in national elections in order to express dissatisfaction with the state of domestic politics. Macron would therefore have been gambling that the fear provoked by the looming threat of a far-right government would prompt voters to rush to back his own ‘Ensemble’ coalition at the polls, thus delivering him electoral gains which would free him from the Parliamentary deadlock which had been the thorn in the side of his minority government since 2022. However, this strategy was based on the assumption that the left would be unable to mount a convincing opposition to the RN itself. This proved false.
Whilst the French left had been characterised by division and internal friction at the start of June, after the news of the surprise election broke it took it less than 36 hours to achieve the remarkable feat of forming the NFP, who were driven by the gravity of the situation to put their differences aside. After coming second to the RN in the first round of the elections (which serves to eliminate candidates who received less than 12.5% of the vote in their respective constituencies from the running), its fortunes changed after it called for a ‘front républicain’. This was an agreement between parliamentary candidates of different parties that whoever came third in a seat where the far-right had come first or second in the first round of the elections would stand down in the next round, in order to encourage mass tactical voting. This call was heeded by most of Ensemble, and in the second and final round, the NFP came first with 182 seats, leaving the RN third with 143. France had come out definitively to say it wanted nothing to do with the far-right.
If, then, Macron’s decision to wait two months before nominating a Prime Minister, only to choose a representative from a right-wing party with no more than 46 seats, seems undemocratic, it’s because it is.
To anyone familiar with the party Les Républicains (LR), it should come as no surprise to learn that the party did not participate in the ‘front républicain’ back in July. You need only examine the profiles of some of its most prominent members to find that a good proportion of LR has much in common with the RN. Bruno Retailleau, the new interior minister, is notoriously anti-immigration with authoritarian leanings, while the new prime minister, Michel Barnier, himself has views on immigration and LGBT rights which overlap with those of Marine Le Pen.
This is, of course, not by chance. By appointing Michel Barnier to the post, Macron created a tacit alliance with the RN, knowing that Le Pen’s party was numerous enough to determine whether any centrist or right-wing government would survive the vote of no confidence which the left would undoubtedly trigger. Whilst a left-wing government could be expected to undo some of Ensemble’s most controversial acts, such as the pension reform or the immigration law, the right would not. As someone not quite far-right, but right-wing enough to be expected to pander to RN’s demands, Michel Barnier was therefore the perfect Prime Minister.
Macron naturally rejected such a cynical analysis, arguing that the unique nature of the situation left him little room for manoeuvre. Since it was taken for granted that the NFP candidate would lose the vote of no confidence the right would have inevitably triggered, their appointment would not be conducive to ‘institutional stability’.
It is true that the results of the legislative elections were unprecedented. With no group having won an absolute nor even relative majority, Macron was not constitutionally obliged to accept a candidate from any particular camp. It is also not unlikely that the NFP candidate, Lucie Castets, would indeed have been rejected by the assembly in a vote of no confidence. Neither of these truths make Macron’s actions any less undemocratic.
One may argue that whilst the NFP received more votes than any other group, the fact that it was not supported by the majority of the electorate made the rejection of it legitimate. This would have been a reasonable argument had the government that was appointed in its place not led to what the majority of people expressly voted against - the most influential far-right in France since the Second World War. Furthermore, there was no absolute guarantee that Castets would have lost a vote of no confidence; this would have been dependent in part on her ability to make allies. It was not for the Élysée to reject her in advance. The argument that a left-wing government would have been unstable rings all the more hollow when one considers that few prominent figures accepted a role in Barnier’s own government out of fear that an immediate rejection in a no confidence vote would be a stain on their reputations.
The reality is that despite all posturing about a front républicain, the President’s camp was always more comfortable with the idea of governing with the far-right than with the left. The will of the people can wait.
Image: Flickr/Amaury Laporte
Image cropped at top to remove date (Tuesday 24 April 2018) and United States of America/French flags.
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