Macron’s Barnier appointment pushes France to the brink

White smoke finally rose out of the Elysee Palace on Sept. 5 after a wait of about two months following the early legislative elections. French President Emmanuel Macron had just given Michel Barnier, the former foreign minister and EU Brexit negotiator, the task of forming the next French government.

Was this a constitutional decision or an actual “coup”?

The last elections resulted in a fragmented National Assembly, with the New Popular Front, a broad left-wing alliance with the Greens, gaining the largest number of representatives among the three main blocs, but without acquiring a majority in the parliament.

Macron, whose camp has been clearly defeated, continues to maneuver by relying on the constitutional power granted to the president to choose the new prime minister, and ignoring the tradition that demands the nomination of the major bloc’s candidate.

Within the political class, it was expected that the leader of the Elysee would embrace the tradition and appoint Lucie Castets, the New Popular Front candidate endorsed by Jean-Luc Melenchon’s “Rebellious France” party. However, the president is using a sorry political spectacle, dominated by partisan squabbles and political calculations, as an excuse, claiming that Castets, a French civil servant, is not fit to form a credible and stable government.

A divided left has responded angrily to Macron’s strategy

Khattar Abou Diab

Taking advantage of the seven-week Olympic Games interlude, Macron remained true to his style of vertical governance, attributing the political deadlock to the absence of a parliamentary majority and tactical party calculations, in order to impose his own choice.

Instead of appointing a key figure from the leading party on July 7, Macron opposed the NPF’s choice, proposing former Prime Minister, Socialist Bernard Cazeneuve, who was rejected by his own party and by the New Popular Front. Furthermore, Macron noted the rejection by the National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, of the Matignon proposal by former right-wing minister Xavier Bertrand.

In order to break this deadlock, Macron propelled veteran Barnier, a member of the Republicans, to the forefront and put him in charge of forming the government. Thus, his game with the right — represented by his main party the Republicans — has a new twist, after having consistently weakened this party since 2017 in order to absorb its electorate. This time, the president has been forced to call in a tenor of the right to save what remains of his five-year term.

There is no doubt that Barnier, a skilled negotiator, has been forced to compromise with the presidential camp. But can the right-winger turn the page? The new political landscape needs to be clarified, with the left denouncing Macron’s “coup,” and the far right keeping the new Matignon tenant under the threat of a censorship veto after indirectly endorsing his appointment.

A furious and divided left has responded angrily to Macron’s strategy.

Insisting that the elections have been “stolen from the French people,” the left denounced the “coup” staged by the president, and the “collision” between the “Macronists” and the far right (National Rally).

Marine Tondelier, leader of the Ecologists, said: “The Barnier government embodies the alliance between the Macronists, the right and the far right.” For his part, former French President François Hollande believes that Macron could have favored the Republican Front, and teases Barnier, who, according to him, has “been cleared by the National Rally.”

The New Popular Front, the leading force in the French National Rally, is furious to see a member of the Republicans, a party that came fifth in the polls, rise to the top of the state. The left sees Barnier as lacking legitimacy, and seems determined to censure him in order to change the situation.

However, the NPF is not without fault in the crisis of the regime, because of its adoption of the radical line imposed by the Rebellious France, and the imbalance within its components.

The NPF is united in denouncing Macron’s denial of democracy

Khattar Abou Diab

In the face of the president’s maneuver to divide the left in order to form a “decent” majority, the Union of the Left has been maintained as a facade. In reality, the “Bernard Cazeneuve to Matignon” hypothesis is leaving its mark on the Socialist Party. The “notables” of the SP, starting with its number one, Olivier Faure, and Hollande, did not give sufficient support to the Matignon candidacy of Bernard Cazeneuve, former prime minister (2016–2017) under Hollande, helping Macron to torpedo this choice and rush the appointment of Barnier as prime minister. Hence, Macron, judging that the country is made up of a predominant right-wing (taking into consideration electoral consultations), accommodates himself with this choice despite the risk of favoring the National Rally by designating it de facto as the arbiter of the fragmented political landscape.

On another note, several members of the Socialist Party, which has long been the leading party on the left, are urgently calling for a Socialist Party congress open to all the party’s factions, so that the left can regain confidence, and some are openly demanding a break with the radical left. This view is shared by left-of-center centrists who believe that “radicalism has shown its limits” and that “the left cannot win without a strengthened Socialist Party.”

Still, within the NPF, the “sectarian drift” and “brutal style” of the leadership of the Rebellious France movement are not appreciated. For this, Faure (Socialist Party), Tondelier (the Greens) and Fabien Roussel (French Communist Party) are accused of being too lenient in the face of the domination of Melenchon’s Rebellious France.

Despite these disputes, the NPF is united in denouncing Macron’s denial of democracy, to the extent that the Socialist Party has agreed to sit in parliament without voting on the proposal put forward by 80 deputies from the NPF to dismiss Macron, in which members of the parliament appeal to Article 68 of the constitution, believing that the head of state has “failed in his duties” since the dissolution.

While waiting for the composition of the Barnier government to be determined by political calculations and personal considerations, the left has shown itself incapable of disrupting Macron’s strategy of maneuvering to complete his mandate at all costs, with the risk of pushing the situation to the extremes and weakening national cohesion.

• Khattar Abou Diab is a French-Lebanese political scientist specializing in Islam and the Middle East, and Director of the "Conseil Géopolitique -Perspectives". X: @abou_diab