France Has Political Breakdown but not yet in Liz Truss Territory

The BBC has excelled itself in the coverage of the French political problem – what Harold Macmillan who knew French politics well would call “little local difficulties”. The BBC has put up fluent English speaking far-left intellectual deputies who support the far-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He like the Labour leadership in the Corbyn years is facing accusations of anti-semitism.

The Mélenchon sect keep saying they won the July National Assembly elections. Melénchon’s group, La France Insoumise, won 77 of the National Assembly’s 577 seats. The former Trotskyist was a guest of honour at the Labour Party conference in 2007 when Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters thought they were poised to win power after winning 50 seats fewer than Theresa May’s Tories.

If you add in 66 seats won by the poorly led Socialist Party and a handful of green and communist parties the overall left alliance has a few more seats than Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. She got more votes - 37 per cent than the 4 party loose left alliance which got 26 per cent.

So under any count the claim the BBC had been promoting that the left was victorious in the summer election in France and should thus form the government is simply untrue.

France has followed other European nations including the Netherlands, Belgium and smaller states in being unable to form a government after an indecisive election. The Dutch and Belgians lived for up to a year without a government.

In France there is no obvious coalition on offer. As in the 1950s when the biggest party in the French National Assembly was the pro-Moscow French Communist Party and governments came and went, France has reverted to type. The strong presidencies of de Gaulle and Mitterrand have given way to weak, ineffectual presidencies in the 21^st century under Srakozy, Hollande, and now Macron.

Macron is the epitome of the Davos elite technocrat. A Rothschild banker brought into government by François Hollande in 2012, he betrayed his patron, and believed the siren calls of the Paris elite that France did not need a down and dirty politician but a new superman above the old politics.

So Macron stood for election for the first time in his life when he won the presidency in 2017 and again in 2022 as his main opponent was the racist, nationalist Le Pen family enterprise flying under different names for their political project.

Le Pen, père et fille, make a splash but so far France has not wanted to give a Le Pen supreme power.

At the same time – as Macron likes to say - in all other elections – for the European Parliament, regional governments, town halls – Macron had little support. As a political ingenu he thought after Le Pen emerged as the leader of the biggest number MEPs in the summer European Parliament elections that by holding an early National Assembly election, France would show it was not turning fully and completely towards a racist populist government.

Le Pen’s nominee for Prime Minister, Jordan Bardella, 30, is unable to answer simple questions on economic, financial, trade, EU or foreign policy questions and simply reverts to saying the only problem France faces is immigration and the number of Muslims in the country.

But as he showed France would not vote to give Le Pen a majority of parliamentary seats, Macron found that he had elevated the Trotskyist, Israel-hating demagogue, Jean-Luc Mélenchon to a national position.

The Socialists have five fewer seats than Mélenchon but a great deal of serious governing and political experience. They have a weak if ambitious and vain leader, Olivier Faure, and as in the days when Labour stayed with unelectable leaders like Wilson, Kinnock, Miliband or Corbyn, the French Socialists do not have the quality of leadership to re-establish a leading position in politics.

This weekend President Trump is coming to France to meet Macron in Paris. While poor Kemi Badenoch is in America hoping to get face-time with Trump, the incoming president has chosen France and Macron to begin his new era of global policy.

French productivity remains much higher than that of the UK. Paris has 8 Elizabeth lines in comparison to London’s one. French hi-speed trains criss-cross France north-south and east-west while Britain cannot manage one that links the capital to a northern city.

France has its imperfections but from health to high-quality trained civil servants it has a record Sir Keir Starmer would like to achieve for Britain. Unnoticed by a London media that has given up reporting Europe, the European Union has become a much tighter, more serious outfit coordinating effective responses to Covid, Ukraine, and has now agreed a very tough, draconian immigration policy.

France and Germany are going through political turmoil but nothing as bad compared to Britain under Boris Johnson or Liz Truss. France will find a technocratic prime minister who will muddle through a budget and other necessary government measures.

Macron has total control over foreign, military, security, alliance policy and handling Putin, China, Africa and Asia. There is more than enough to keep him busy until either a possible new National Assembly election in the summer though it is far from clear a new election will produce a stable majority government.

Now the focus will turn to the claimants to the Elysée for the presidential election in 2027. Marine Le Pen may be declared ineligible to hold public office by a court early next year after her massive fiddling of MEP expenses to spend on national party organisation.

The Socialists at some stage have to slip out from being Mélenchon’s political zimmer frame and restablish themselves as Labour did after Corbyn as a serious party of national government.

France has had far worse political crises but isn’t going to collapse no matter what the monolingual London media tell us.

Denis MacShane is the former Minister for Europe. He wrote the first biography in English of François Mitterrand in 1982. He is London correspondent of Le Journal and appears on French TV and radio.