Macron’s temporising keeps a divided France on edge

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is editorial director and a columnist at Le Monde

Something unusual is happening in France. President Emmanuel Macron is not talking, the country has no government and the French people are not complaining.

At least not yet. In June, Macron launched an ill-fated gamble to call snap parliamentary elections to “clarify” the outcome of European parliament elections that produced a victory for the French far right. However, clarity is more elusive than ever.

With no majority in parliament, no prime minister able to survive a vote of no confidence and no possibility of calling a new election for another year, Macron has fallen silent while still looking for a way out of a crisis of his own making. As for the leaders of the political parties he has been consulting over the past week, they do not seem to have benefited from the spirit of goodwill that took over the country during the Olympics.

What makes the situation so complicated is that it has no precedent in the Fifth Republic, governed by a constitution tailor-made for Charles de Gaulle in 1958. The current crisis has exposed the vulnerabilities of the French constitutional regime — a dual executive function paired with a majority voting system — in a fragmented political landscape. The famed “cohabitation”, which on three occasions has forced a president and a prime minister from the opposition to work together, was possible with strong parties on right and left. But that was another era. When he came to power in 2017 by trampling over the moribund traditional parties of left and right, Macron did not imagine that their very weakness would come back to haunt him seven years later.

On July 7, French voters mobilised en masse to deny a majority to the far-right Rassemblement National, preventing it from claiming the position of prime minister. That was the good news. The bad news is that they also prevented the two other blocs, the centre and the left, from governing, as none of them now has enough seats in the National Assembly to reach the required majority. French voters clearly stated what they did not want, but did not decide what they wanted.

In other European countries, it is up to the political parties to work out a compromise to build a majority. French parties have so far been unable to do that. Not only are they unaccustomed to this practice, but some of their leaders are more interested in preserving their chances of running in the next presidential election in 2027 than in trying to assemble a precarious parliamentary majority today. 

Left with the responsibility of finding a consensual prime minister in a non-consensual environment for which he is largely to blame, Macron has rejected an attempt from the leftwing Nouveau Front Populaire, an alliance of four parties, to impose their candidate for prime minister. He seems to have made a major concession by finally accepting, in his talks with party leaders, that his own former majority lost the election on July 7 — an improvement from his initial “nobody won” analysis. He is willing to accept “a whiff of cohabitation” with opposition parties, as one adviser put it. What he is not ready to accept is the undoing of the pro-business agenda he has promoted over the past seven years, most importantly the hard-fought, unpopular pension reform.

How long can Macron behave en même temps as “president, prime minister and party leader”, as Lucie Castets, the leftwing would-be prime minister, has claimed? His room for manoeuvre is not that wide. His calculation that the leftwing alliance will eventually explode, liberating the mainstream socialists from the grip of his radical nemesis Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is proving slow to materialise. Those socialists who are working towards that end, such as former president François Hollande, who is now a member of the legislature, are not doing it to come to Macron’s rescue.

According to opinion polls, the French public has so far been patient but now expects a decision to be taken. Other imperatives point to the urgency. The budget must be ready by mid-September and submitted to parliament on October 1. It is being prepared by the caretaker government, which is under pressure from Brussels to reduce the public debt and so will require strong political support. 

On the geopolitical front, with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also in a precarious position at home and Russia still on the offensive in Ukraine, Europe cannot afford to have two of its major powers paralysed by domestic travails. More temporising from Macron would give a chance to extremist parties to force a genuine constitutional crisis, possibly leading to his resignation and devastating instability.