France: The Ruling Class among Themselves – and the Next Government Crisis just Around the Corner

The end of the french government – not so long in power – looks inevitable, even imminent, and would add to the country’s political malaise. The only question seems to be: How long can it last? The French fascination with the guillotine has found a new focus over the last week. The man under the knife is France’s silver-haired prime minister, Michel Barnier, known for composure on previous scaffolds.

His political life could even be over this or the next week, or possibly before Christmas, a prospect prompting speculation about the financial chaos, American-style government shutdown and unpaid salaries for the fifth of France’s work force on the public payrolls. That the country might soon be without a government is adding to the French malaise ...

The prospect of a government collapse sent French borrowing costs soaring relative to Germany’s last week, pushing them almost to the low level of Greece’s. A showdown could come in the next days, when Mr. Barnier might try to force through a budget bill on government health care and other social spending. Even Mr. Barnier, a veteran politician who negotiated a tough Brexit deal for the European Union and served four times as a minister in previous governments, concedes that he is living on borrowed time. The woman in control of the blade is Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right populist National Rally.

She doesn’t like Mr. Barnier’s budget of some 60 billion euros in tax increases and spending cuts. She doesn’t like his cuts to some medical reimbursements and increases in electricity fees – “violent, unjust, inefficient,” she told reporters on last tuesday – and she has suggested that her party will censure him if he forces his budgets through without a vote in Parliament. Mr. Barnier gave ground on the electricity fees on last thursday, but Ms. Le Pen said that was not enough.

Bypassing the lower house of Parliament often provokes cries of autocracy and outrage among lawmakers. Led by the left, and joined by the far right, they will almost definitely put the government to a confidence vote. Nearly as certain, that would mean the end for Mr. Barnier and his government, forcing him and his ministers to resign. “To get out of this impasse, he’s counting on the National Rally”, said Sylvain Crépon, an expert on the French far right at the University of Tours. “So that means it is omnipotent. It’s the party that will save him.”

Others in the party are more explicit than Ms. Le Pen. “If they remain deaf to us, they should pack their bags”, one of her party’s lawmakers in Parliament, Laurent Jacobelli, told the television station BFMTV. That the Donald J. Trump-friendly National Rally calls the shots in France, which has so far resisted the pull of crony populism, is only half-acknowledged by the news media and by a political class that greeted the American election largely with alarm.

But now, the prime minister is vulnerable, and Ms. Le Pen appears not in a good mood. “None of our ideas were included in the government’s budget, even hypothetically”, Ms. Le Pen, who often sounds aggrieved, wrote in an article last week. “We’re getting closer to a censure motion”, the Socialist lawmaker Jérôme Guedj said on French television.

Barnier was appointed in September by President Emmanuel Macron, who ignored parliamentary election results that were disastrous for his own party and allies. The leftist coalition that had won the election was furious. But Mr. Macron was exercising as often his constitutional prerogative. Since then, the weakness of Mr. Barnier’s position has become clear. He is living “the hell of Matignon”, a phrase used by generations of political commentators to describe the difficulties of reigning from Matignon Palace, seat of the government, where a leader has some power, but hardly all of it. The average tenure for a French prime minister is two and a half years, and Mr. Barnier seems likely to come in well under.

Now, the far right feels scorned, the left dislikes Mr. Barnier on principle, and he is unloved by Mr. Macron’s centrist deputies because he proposes wringing more revenue out of the rich and out of 440 of France’s biggest companies, a violation of the French president’s pro-business creed.

In an interview on French television on Tuesday, Mr. Barnier smiled. He tried to project calm. “I’ve known since the 5th of September” (the day he was appointed) “that there would be a censure vote”, he said. But, he noted also: “Then what happens? There won’t be a budget. And there will be a serious storm in the financial markets.”

Mr. Barnier started his political life more than 50 years ago as a 22-year-old Gaullist councilor in his native Savoy, in France’s eastern mountains. He has methodically climbed the rungs of the political ladder – member of Parliament, regional president, senator, cabinet minister. He is sometimes mocked for his phlegmatic demeanor but, with advancing age, is not perceived as a threat to others’ careers. Called “the French Joe Biden” by the news media, he finished well behind rivals in a presidential primary in 2021.