The absurdist farce of French politics

It’s the rentrée politique this week in France, the start of the political year, a bit earlier than normal. It promises to be a macedoine of absurdist farce and media frenzy. On Friday President Emmanuel Macron, the principal personality in this drama, will begin to see the leaders of some (but not all) of the 14 or 15 political factions that form the dysfunctional National Assembly.

His mission is to appoint a prime minister who can cobble together some semblance of a credible, durable government in the EU’s second-largest economy. An economy that already does not comply with European Union debt limits, with debt that could soon again explode. A magician is needed but the signs so far aren’t promising. 

Macron must conjure a government from the 577-seat Assembly, which currently resembles the notorious riotous assemblies of the Fourth Republic. Marked above all is the mutual hatred of its members for one another. Even when you combine the factions into groups, the largest bloc in the Assembly is the self-loathing NFP which has 182 seats. It’s made up of Mélenchon’s hard left on 74, the Socialists on 59, Greens on 28, and Communists, nine. 

Macron’s faction is made up of his own party with 102, various Democratic centrists on 33, the Horizon party of former prime minister Édouarde Philippe on 25, and eight other seats.

The nationalist but still economically socialist National Rally has 143 seats. There is also the center-right Republican party with 46 seats and a hodgepodge of smaller parties with 39 seats between them. 

The single largest party in the assembly is Rassemblement, which took 37 percent of the popular vote, and which can now sit back with no responsibility for the consequences. (With a smaller share of the vote, the Labour party in the UK just seized complete control of parliament. Democracy works in mysterious ways.)

This bordel is the responsibility of Macron’s misjudged dissolving of the Assembly after his embarrassing result in the European elections. Before the dissolution he had his pension reform. He had a relative majority. The media was squared. But he threw it all away on an entirely unnecessary bet. He could have simply ignored the result of the frankly irrelevant European election and carried on. He didn’t but is carrying on anyway.

France has now been without a real government for more than a month. In the absence of other than a caretaker government, with civil servants running everything as usual, there’s happily no real evidence of any material degradation in everyday life. The trains still run more or less on time. The garbage is collected. There have even been fewer summer riots, which occurred in Britain instead this year, much to the amusement of the French. Perhaps a perpetual phantom government would be better for France than a more material one. It seems to have worked in Belgium for a while.

In the absence of any substantive business, the Assembly has spent its time arguing amongst itself and appearing on guest-starved summer chat shows, with MPs slagging off each other and Macron. All of this seems largely ignored outside the Paris political-media bubble. Real people here have been talking about Alain Delon, and the beautiful tribute to him by Brigitte Bardot. And in rural France, the devastated harvest. 

It’s a bit like the Fringe with lots of stages and many unconvincing performances. Jean-Luc Mélenchon has been holding forth demanding the removal of the president, attracting general amusement by the many who loathe him. The wider left has proposed a compromise candidate for prime minister, already rejected by Macron. Marine Le Pen is breeding cats and plotting her 2027 presidential run, her fourth. 

The New Popular Front alliance of socialists, greens, communists, Islamists and at least one convicted member of Antifa, have proposed as a candidate for prime minister Lucie Castets, a functionary who works for the City of Paris, and has subsequently come out as a lesbian mother, to general indifference. Her problem is she’s not been elected to anything, ever. As a former pre-Brexit municipal counsellor in my commune, even I have achieved higher office. Who is she? Head of finance at the drowning-in-debt Paris town hall. Also, inevitably, a graduate of the École National d’Administration. It is not hard to score this as eccentric at best, if not desperate.

Forget legislation, none can be proposed nor any government business be pursued, other than day-to-day housekeeping. So France now has an Assembly concerned entirely with itself. There are no debates about policy, but only politics, which interests the French little in the remaining days of summer’s lease.

Mélenchon — and tender readers, look away now, I am about to agree with him — may have a solid point that after losing two elections in a row, Macron has wafer-thin legitimacy. It’s democracy, Jacques, but not as we knew it. The voters spoke first in the June European election in which Macron’s list collapsed and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National soared. Rassemblement won by far the most votes, 31.5 percent. Macron’s Renaissance flopped to 14.5 percent, just ahead of the Socialists and their lead candidate Raphaël Glucksmann.

There followed Macron’s tantrum/psychotic episode, never satisfactorily explained, in which he seemed to have imagined he could renew his centrist mandate by engaging in a centrist-leftist electoral pact to stop Rassemblement from winning a governing majority. He dissolved the Assembly.

A negligent wager with no upside and unlimited downside — and this from the so-called Mozart of finance, whom one might presume numerate. It was a bet he inevitably lost because the Assembly election turned into yet another referendum on him, and the left and right crushed his centrist parliamentary group. Macron is left with no relative majority and an Assembly in which no evident coalition or cohabitation is plausible. He cut-off at the knees the somewhat sane prime minister Gabriel Attal after just five months in office. He has turned a setback into a catastrophe. 

It’s a funny democracy in which the president can lose his plurality in the Assembly, lose his dominance in the European parliament, lose the confidence of 75 percent of voters, and go on holiday. Curious when he can leave his defeated ministers nominally in charge while preening on television with victorious French Olympians.

Now what? I am not sure I am climbing out on a very fine limb to suggest that the prime minister Macron seeks is unlikely to exist. And even if he can find some myrmidon willing to take it on, the National Assembly is unlikely to agree on anything other than to make this person’s job impossible.

Macron with the help of the usual soup-servers in the elite circles of the subsidized French media, and plenty of hare-brained opinion pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker and Spiegel, has yet to face the consequences of his blundering, sheltered by the Olympic Games and the sacred European vacation.

As if any of this was positive for Macron it can get worse. There’s the ever-present threat of Mélenchon and the Trots calling their followers to the streets.

The existential threat however is pension reform, the president’s only substantial achievement. The Assembly is disunited but a majority hold their president in contempt and share a desire to humiliate him by repealing the reform, which he had rammed through only by decree.   

There is no accurate calculation of what this could cost but estimates of €100-200 billion annually are floated, as an aging population retires at 60, and there is nobody to pay the bills. Macron may be narcissistic, disagreeable and responsible for the most intractable political crisis in decades, but he was always right that France needed to fix its sclerotic economy. Instead he has recklessly gambled with the credit and credibility of France, and lost. And given the keys to left and nationalist politicians who imagine that country can spend its way out of crisis.

Why Macron should survive having led his country to this is hard to imagine, except the alternative is worse. 

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.