Mon ami, Michel Barnier. France's Politician for All Seasons

            Michel Barnier, 73, is the politician for all seasons in France. Emmanuel Macron has reached out to him to be France’s Prime Minister and thus try and allow a functioning government to emerge after Marcon’s folly of dissolving the National Assembly. The result was like Caesar’s Gaul – French politics divided into thirds. The left, the right and oddball centre covering Macron’s own invented party all emerged from the National Assembly elections without a majority to govern.

            None would tolerate compromise. The left group won the biggest number of seats in the French Parliament under the banner of the New Popular Front. But this alliance against nature headed by the Trotskyist antisemitic demagogue Jean-Luc Mélenchon in a loose alliance with French socicalists left-over from the Mitterrand era and last in government 2012-17 under François Hollande plus remnants of the once-mightyThe  French Communist Party and protest vote Geens is not a unitary party and all its top figures are waiting to see when they break apart to run separately in the 2027 French presidential race.

           The extreme right with slightly fewer seats than the left  is the Le Pen family party, once called the National Front under its founder the anti-semitic racist Jean-Marie Le Pen and now known as the National Rally under his daughter, Marine Le Pen. It has the French franchise for the 21^st century anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-European, pro-Putin new populist identity nationalist politics whicb can be seen in the US with Trump, Italy with Melone, Germany with the AFD, England with Reform and the Braverman wing of the Brexit era Tory party and variations in many countries.

            Le Pen won fewer seats than Mélenchon. In the middle is the Renaissance party set up by Macron to be his personal vehicle for giving him a parliamentary majority to pass laws. A French president does defence, wars, foreign policy but on the whole leaves domestic legislation to the National Assembly, the Prime Minister and the usual ministers.

            Barnier in a long career has worked with all political tribes. He has a bust of General de Gaulle in his study and always told me he was a “social Gaullist.” He rose to fame as a local politician in his native Alpine region of Haute Savoie when he organised the successful Winter Olympics in 1992. He was a European Commissioner for the Regions and then Foreign Minister under Chirac when I worked with him in the last period a British government took Europe seriously.

            He would offer me lifts on his ministerial jet to meetings we both had to attend and I enjoyed the high quality French cuisine the French state provides for its ministers in contrast to the Ryanair sandwiches offered by the parsimonious Foreign Office .

            We kept in touch and when he took over the Brexit negotiation portfolio for the EU we would meet regularly in Brussels or Paris as I reported on the Brexit state of play in London politics.

            He ignored the bombast from Boris Johnson and boasts from David Frost to give Europe a ring-fenced deal that offered no concessions to the vanity of the Brits who thought the EU needed the UK more than Britain needed trade and access to Europe.

            Now he has to see if he can find a majority for the laws that France needs passing to be governed. Marine Le Pen has promised total rejection of anything any Prime Minister other than one she nominates from her extreme right camp might propose.

            Jean-Luc Mélenchon also plays the classic Trotskyist equivalent of a leftist rejection of any laws proposed by a “bourgeois” prime minister.

            Barnier does not have a majority and thanks to Macron’s who himself is without any experience of parliamentary politics, coalition formation, or working with anyone who is not a Oui-man or woman he is embarking on something close to mission impossible.

            But he is Monsieur Compromise and France’s most experienced Can-Do politician. In the end the French blockage requires a change of national leadership. The Socialists and Mélenchonites no more belong in the same party as did Jeremy Corbyn and Sir Keir Starmer or Yanis Varoufakis and Greek democratic socialists.

            Barnier agreeing to take the jobs is interesting in itself. He not failed in any of the big jobs he has done for France. Cleaning up the Augean Stables mess Macron has created will he is biggest test so far.