Macron’s Faustian bargain could be a dire turning point for France

Should Le Pen order her parliamentary bloc to withdraw its provisional backing and vote no confidence against the new administration of Prime Minister Michel Barnier, a conservative stalwart and former foreign minister, the government would immediately collapse. (A sizable group of leftist parties already opposes it.) Three quarters of French polled after Barnier’s appointment said they expect the government to fall soon.

For France, that means a party with a xenophobic core message — it favors a “national preference” for French citizens in employment, housing and health care at the expense of the 11 percent of residents who are foreign-born — now exercises what amounts to a veto over the government and its decisions.

That’s a dramatic turn of events. Macron has long believed his most urgent mission, critical to his own legacy, is to block the extreme right’s ascent. While he has not handed power outright to the National Rally, the new arrangement tilts toward power sharing.

And the French far right’s new clout could accelerate Europe’s slide toward an anti-immigrant, ethnonationalist, Euroskeptic model on a continent that has been slouching in that direction for years.

France is the world’s seventh-largest economy and one of five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and it commands one of the West’s most formidable militaries. It is also now led by the most unstable government of any major industrial power.

Macron was the instigator of this Faustian bargain, but France’s so-called moderates of the left and right share the blame. Had they been willing to compromise after elections two months ago, they could have joined Macron’s own bloc in a broadly centrist coalition behind a new government; that’s what the president would have preferred.

Each refused. Given a balkanized Parliament, Macron was then forced to choose a prime minister backed by just one side, along with its most extreme allies. In the end, he opted for the right by picking Barnier, 73, a longtime French statesman who also served as the European Union’s top Brexit negotiator.

According to the French media, the president sought Le Pen’s assurance that she would not immediately call a no-confidence vote to topple the new government. But her National Rally served notice that it will hold the government hostage to its hard-line agenda — including, most likely, a draconian clampdown on immigration. If, Le Pen said Sunday, “the French are once again forgotten or mistreated, we will not hesitate to censure the government.”

For the time being, Macron gets some protection for his hard-fought reform in raising France’s retirement age to 64 from 62, which Barnier has supported. That puts the nation’s pension system, and long-term finances, on a firmer footing.

Macron set this drama in motion by dissolving Parliament in June and calling fresh elections after a strong performance by the National Rally in elections for the relatively toothless European Parliament.

That was a gratuitous roll of the dice in pursuit of what Macron called “a clear majority.” He wound up with the opposite — a hung Parliament split between factions on the left, right and center, with Le Pen’s party the single largest. That yielded a summer-long political paralysis during which France operated with a caretaker government of holdover ministers.

The only likely beneficiary from the chaos is Le Pen, who is preparing the ground for a presidential campaign, her third, in 2027. Having been granted the role of kingmaker in the selection of Macron’s new government, and now as guarantor of its survival, she has acquired a credential she covets: respectability.

That’s an invaluable commodity for the leader of a movement founded by sympathizers of the Nazi-puppet Vichy government of World War II. They included her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a convicted Holocaust denier.

Marine Le Pen has tried to detoxify the party by expelling antisemites and embracing quotidian issues such as the cost of living. Her goal has been to break the firewall French mainstream parties erected to keep the National Rally out of power.

Now, Macron has allowed not just a crack in the firewall but a yawning breach, brought about by his impulsive decision to shuffle France’s political deck when no such move was necessary.

How Le Pen will deploy that leverage — by pressing for her party’s populist, right-wing agenda or by hewing to the center — will become clearer over the coming months. What is extraordinary is that after years on the margins, the French far right now has a chokehold on government policies and the nation’s future.