France is desperately searching for a government
After the relief, the confusion. France pulled back from the brink on July 7th when it rejected Marine Le Pen’s hard right at a final parliamentary vote. The electorate instead relegated her alliance to third place, and returned a hung parliament in which no bloc is close to holding a majority. But this has plunged France into new uncertainty. “Now what do we do?” asked the front page of Le Parisien, a daily paper, above a photo of a perplexed-looking President Emmanuel Macron.
In other European countries, the response is simple: rival parties sit down to hammer out a coalition agreement. But France has a weak culture of political compromise. The country has entered a period of bluff, posture, muddle and manoeuvring while it tries to work out who can govern.
The final vote in this snap election confounded the polls and dismayed Ms Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) and allies. They ended up with 143 seats, a big jump on the 88 the RN held in the outgoing 577-seat National Assembly. But under France’s two-round system, the hard right fell well short of the 289 seats it needed to govern, despite attracting some 10m votes in the second round. Pre-vote chatter about who might get ministerial jobs ended in silence. Jordan Bardella, Ms Le Pen’s 28-year-old candidate for prime minister, admitted to “casting errors” that may have cost seats; in the rush, some dodgy candidates were selected. Ms Le Pen declared simply that “victory has been postponed”.
The good news for liberal democrats, at least in the short run, is that the “republican front”, an electoral alliance to keep out the hard right, held. Tactical deals between Mr Macron’s centrists and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing New Popular Front (NFP), to withdraw candidates in over 200 constituencies in order to avoid splitting the anti-RN vote, paid off. Sports stars, including Kylian Mbappé, a footballer, rallied round, urging the French not to vote “for the extremes”. Turnout, at 67%, was the highest for a second-round legislative vote for 27 years. Nearly two-thirds of voters cast a non-RN vote.
Yet if Mr Macron sought clarity at the ballot box, it has provided little. Voters have elected a fragmented assembly that reflects a fractured country. To the surprise of even those on the left, the four-party NFP has emerged as the biggest group in parliament. It holds 182 seats, next to 168 for Mr Macron’s centrist alliance, Ensemble. The president’s group was severely weakened, losing nearly 100 seats. But Ensemble was far from wiped out, and now holds the balance of parliamentary power.
Three scenarios lie ahead. The Fifth Republic’s constitution gives the president the power to name the prime minister, but does not specify the criteria or a timeline for doing so. Mr Macron has kept on Gabriel Attal (pictured) in the job, as a caretaker. The first option, in line with precedent, would be to name his replacement from the biggest parliamentary bloc, even without a majority. That is what happened in 2022, when Mr Macron lost his.
Yet the NFP, a disparate crew of Mr Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (LFI), Communists, Greens and Socialists, has struggled to agree on a candidate for the prime ministership. Moreover its LFI elements, soaked in revolutionary rhetoric, are adamant that the bloc should govern alone. On election night, a triumphant Mr Mélenchon, a former Trotskyist, claimed victory and announced that his bloc would “implement its programme, nothing but its programme”. This includes pledges to raise the minimum wage by 14%, restore the wealth tax, freeze energy bills and basic-food prices, and lower the pension age.
A hike in the minimum wage could be passed by decree, without consulting parliament. So, possibly, could the abrogation of Mr Macron’s pension reform, which raised the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 years—although it would still require legislation to finance the budgetary hole this would leave. Such measures would be “fatal for the French economy”, said Patrick Martin, head of Medef, the employers’ federation. The French public finances are already stretched; the budget deficit is set to exceed 5% of GDP in 2024.
The markets might help to discipline extravagant spending plans. Moody’s, a ratings agency, warned in a note on July 9th that a reversal of the pension reform could imperil France’s sovereign rating. The European Commission could also act as a brake. As Mujtaba Rahman, European director of Eurasia Group, a consultancy, points out: “The commission’s decision to put France into an excessive-deficit procedure is a reminder that Brussels and Berlin want France’s deficit and debt to fall, not rise.” Either way, a minority NFP government could be toppled by a no-confidence motion at the first opportunity, at the latest when the budget is due in September.
A second option, which Mr Macron said in an open “letter to the French” on July 10th he is now seeking, is to forge a coalition government that could command a stable majority. The numbers, on paper, add up. A German-style coalition, reaching from the Greens and Socialists on the left, via Ensemble, to the Republicans on the right, would command a majority. The president, says an aide, considers that no bloc won a mandate to govern alone. In his letter he urged politicians who share basic republican and pro-European values to take “a bit of time” to forge a compromise.
The trouble is that the politics are very tricky. France is capable of building coalitions at local level, and in the European Parliament, but has a collective mental block at national level. Compromise is seen as weakness; outreach to rivals, betrayal. Ensemble deputies who hail from the right would prefer an alliance with the Republicans. Those from the left of Ensemble think the conversation has to start on the left, but cannot include Mr Mélenchon’s party. Unless the NFP collapses, however, neither option could produce a majority. Nobody wants to be the first to jump in with the unpopular Mr Macron.
A few cracks in the NFP edifice have begun to appear. In a scathing interview in Le Monde this week, François Ruffin, one of Mr Mélenchon’s re-elected LFI deputies, broke with the party. He called its firebrand leader “a force of repulsion” during the campaign, comparing Mr Mélenchon’s influence to “carrying a backpack full of stones”. In the Socialist Party, some figures even mutter about co-operating with the centre. Carole Delga, president of the Occitanie region, this week called for a government centred on the Socialist Party, but which could reach from the Communists on the left to “an element” of Mr Macron’s Ensemble. Much of the left, however, will be infuriated that Mr Macron now seems to be ruling out giving them the chance to govern alone.
If all else fails, Mr Macron could resort to a third option: a “technical” government, run by a technocrat, as Italy did when it called on Mario Draghi. This would keep government ticking over until fresh elections can be held in a year. Such a move could bring stability, but at a price: enraging voters who sense a stitch-up in Paris. “It’s all very fluid,” says a senior figure in Mr Macron’s party, still hopeful for a coalition. “We can see the solution, but not the path to getting there.” ■
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