After a deadlocked election, can anyone govern France?
A BLACK OFFICIAL car swept into the courtyard of the Elysée Palace on July 8th carrying Gabriel Attal, the 35-year-old French prime minister. He went to tender his resignation to President Emmanuel Macron, as tradition dictates after a parliamentary election. This time, however, the voting a day earlier had been so inconclusive that Mr Macron asked him to stay on in a caretaker role. France has no replacement government ready, and is not yet sure how to form one.
Other Europeans, with their fragmented parliaments, are used to dealing with unclear outcomes. Rival parties sit down together, manage their differences and hammer out a coalition deal, however long it takes. In Germany in 2021 it took 73 days, and a 166-page document, to form the current federal government. Belgium went for nearly two years before it forged a seven-party coalition government the previous year.
French political parties, however, have no tradition of consensus-seeking compromise, at least not at national level. Charles de Gaulle devised the Fifth Republic’s constitution in 1958 to deliver clear majorities, and by and large that is what it has done. The constitution also makes clear that it is up to the president to name the prime minister. But it sets no criteria for doing so. Political precedent suggests that Mr Macron should invite the bloc with the biggest number of seats to try to form a government, even without a majority. This was the case for his own centrist alliance, which formed a minority government in 2022.
The logical first option now, therefore, would be to ask the left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front (NFP), to try to form a government. This four-party grouping won 182 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, more than either Mr Macron’s centrists (168 seats) or Marine Le Pen’s hard-right (143). But the constituent parties of the NFP disagree on many things, among them who such a prime minister should be. Discussions are ongoing behind closed doors. Even within the alliance, the emerging consensus seems to be that it should not be the radical Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads the NFP’s largest component, Unsubmissive France. A name could emerge in the coming days.
Even if the NFP was invited to form a minority government, however, it might not last long. By itself the alliance is over 100 seats short of the 289 needed to govern with a stable majority, and is highly unlikely to be able to scrape together the numbers needed to secure one. Besides which many of its plans involve heavy spending. With a budget deficit forecast to reach over 5% of GDP this year, France’s public finances are already stretched. Markets could swiftly punish extravagant unfunded big-spending plans. As Mujtaba Rahman, European director of Eurasia, a consultancy, points out: “The European 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.”
An alternative for Mr Macron, who wants to see a stable government put in place, would be to hold out for a cross-party alliance—which might reach from the moderate left, including the Greens, to the moderate right—capable of commanding a majority. This is what Yaël Braun-Pivet, the outgoing president of the National Assembly, is pushing for, stressing that the initiative has to come from parliament. The numbers are there on paper; but the politics are challenging. The left, buoyant after its unexpected first place in these elections, says it wants to govern by itself, and is in no mood to do deals with Mr Macron’s lot. The centrists, in turn, could work with the left only if the moderate bits broke away from Mr Mélenchon. This could yet happen, but not right away.
A third option would be a “technical government”. Run by a civil servant or technocrat, of the sort that Mario Draghi managed in Italy, this would be designed to keep the machinery of government running rather than to enact big reforms, and to last until fresh elections. Under the constitution, these cannot take place for at least another 12 months. The markets would doubtless approve, and such a government would bring stability.
But French voters are already distrustful of Mr Macron’s outgoing technocrat-heavy team. It is unlikely that such an outcome would be acceptable unless all political efforts had been exhausted, and the country genuinely felt ungovernable. The French, in short, have returned a fractured parliament that accurately reflects the divided nature of the country, but which offers no clear or immediate path to generating a stable government. ■
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