France’s Ancien Régime No Longer Works But What Comes Next?
Time for a new Republic and new Constitution that obliges cooperation not confrontation?
France’s Ancien Régime No Longer Works But What Comes Next?
PARIS:
I have been patrolling the couloirs of Paris politics – ministers, politicians, influencers – ever since I wrote the first biography in English of François Mitterrand 40 years ago but never have I come across such disarray, uncertainty, and fear that France may on the brink of a breakdown of democratic, give-and-take politics, and instead return to autocratic one-party rule based on hate, identity, and race.
France now has a Prime Minister, a post which is a kind of a Chief Executive Officer answerable to a President sanctioned by a vote of all the people as in the United States.
But the French Parliament (National Assembly) still has to vote laws. A president can rule by decree but Macron’s efforts to pass a new law on pensions hitting middle and lower income French by presidential decree unleashed a protest movement that only boosted the extreme right Marine Le Pen and extreme left Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Michel Barnier the former Brexit negotiator, a successful EU Commissioner, and Foreign Minister of France has been named Prime Minister but so far the two main blocks of deputies refuse to make normal law-making possible again. So s return to normal government may be mission impossible as there is simply no majority for any party or coalition of deputies visible or emerging that would have a majority to vote laws.
Barnier has just been voted the most popular politician in France but that is more a comment on the dislike and rejection of all other mainstream political figures including President Macron.
Macron was elected in 2017 after the two previous presidents, ,the rightist Nicholas Sarkozy (2007-12) and the socialist François Hollande (2012-17) failed to get France moving.
Macron was a banker, a charter member of the Davos elite in France, but completely out of touch with non-graduate workers who can barely pay their bills. He ran a monarchical presidency and unlike Sarkozy or Hollande, won a second term as his opponent was Marine Le Pen. in 2022 she wa as electable to govern France as Jeremy Corbyn was in Britain or Bernie Sanders in the US.
De Gaulle set up a political party as he understood that he needed networks of support in every city, town, department and commune in France.
Macron was uninterested in the plumbing of good politics. Many socialist deputies in 2017 offered to work with him as they agreed with a good part of his modernisation, reformist agenda and his belief that Europe should stand on its own feet against Putin, Russia, Islamism instead of following loyally behind Washington in the manner of London or Berlin.
Macron told them to drop dead. He only wanted non-politicians who would kneel before this monarchical style.
Good ideas with bad politics can’t govern a country. France wasn’t ready for Marine Le Pen in 2022. Even this summer she had to suspend dozens of candidates who were found out via social media to be anti-semitic, anti-Muslim, racist, or pro-Putin.
But her National Rally Party did get most votes in the European Parliament elections in June. European Parliament elections are usually protest voters as few European electorates see Brussels as a replacement for their own national governments. She proclaimed herself leader of the first party in France and claimed she had the right to form a government.
Macron called her bluff by dissolving the National Assembly and in the subsequent election for new deputies Le Pen came third. A heterogenous alliance of the social democratic Socialist, the anti-capitalist Trotskyists led by a demagogue Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Green and the remnants of the once might French Communist Party won most seats but still only a third not even close to a majority.
In other countries where there is a tradition of coalitions governments – Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Nordic Europe – some kind of governing arrangement would emerge.
But France is closer to the United States or Britain where single parties considers themselves invested with the only truth and if they get most seats should take all the ministerial jobs and respect only their own policies as drawn up by their militant activists.
In Britain, Labour under Sir Keir Starmer also only won a third of the votes like Le Pen or the left in France. But British MPs are not elected on a list system but on a simple vote in individual constituencies. So Sir Keir Starmer, the new Labour prime minister, has 411 out of 630 MPs but on the basis of one third of votes cast.
Learned articles in French papers are urging French deputies to learn the art of coalition government but Le Pen and the left both insist their one third of total votes case entitles them to form a Government and name ministers from their own camp.
Some political grandees mainly on the old governing socialist left are calling for proportional representation as the way out of the ungovernability impasse. France used a form of PR in the fourth republic between 1946 and 1958. 21 different PR based governments came and went in those 12 twelve years. They produced the disasters of the Vietnam and Algerian wars and left in 1958 to de Gaulle returning from internal exile and being granted executive presidential powers which Macron has inherited.
But de Gaulle understood politics and created his own party which Macron made no effort to do. He did set a party which has changed its name but he is the supreme leader and takes no notice of what what his supporters think.
Now that happens? From discussions with veteran French political figures and long-time observers of French politics there are two scenarios. The first sees Barnier who is a social or left-wing Gaullist unable to find ministers outside his own former party which came fifth in the July National Assembly elections. He cannot find a majority to pass any law which is needed to cut France’s massive and growing deficit which break all obligations meant to be obeyed by EU governments.
Marine Le Pen who thinks she will inherit the presidency if Macron is seen to be unable to govern just waits patiently. The non-rightist parties endlessly bicker and squabble and refuse to unite behind an electable candidate for the presidency or prime minister.
By next summer France is utterly blocked with the 577 deputies unable to agree on anything except their own generous pay and allowances. The Macron era has run out of steam. There is no point in holding new parliamentary elections next year as they will not produce a new result as the voters and the political classes of France no longer accept Macron as a legitimate chief of the nation.
In this scenario He resigns and France moves to a presidential election followed by National Assembly elections.
Who succeeds Macron in this scenario is unclear/ There is Le Pen but she remains toxic and her hate politics of division may be more than a French democratic market can accept.
The Socialists may finally have the courage to do what the Labour Party did when they dumped Jeremy Corbyn and dissociate themselves from Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The old Gaullist right may run Barnier who has just called for the rich to pay higher taxes to help the disastrous state of French finances thanks to Davos elite economic management of all French politicians this century.
Right now no-one in France knows who would win a 2025 presidentiao election.
The alternative scenario is that Barnier muddles along finding enough votes with the usual offers that can be made to ambitious politicians to vote one way or the other.
Macron spends his last two years doing foreign affairs which he enjoys and promoting the idea of French – European strategic autonomy. He may seek a partnership with Britain and Sir Keir Starmer on some initiatives in the Balkans .
His presidency would end in spring 2027. This might suit Marine Le Pen who needs more time to purge the party of its more toxic racist sharp edges and promote Giorgia Meloni type hard rightists but who can use the polite language of political salons rather than the street demagogy against French Muslims and Brussels.
The Socialists too may want to avoid a rupture next spring so that as in Britain, Spain, or Poland a non-rightist party can work towards winning a parliamentary majority and even have a crack at the presidency.
François Mitterrand’s favourite political watchword was “Il faut donner le temps au temps.” Give time to time. Festina lente. Make haste slowly. France has had fourteen constitutions and five republics since the French revolution in 1789. A new constitution and a sixth republic may soon take shape.
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