At the end of a long summer of whispers, rumours and stalled negotiations, Emmanuel Macron has pulled off yet another dramatic surprise by announcing that the 73-year-old Michel Barnier will be his prime minister.
Since the president dissolved parliament in June after the resounding success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in the country’s elections to the European Parliament, France has effectively not had a government. In the parliamentary elections that followed (called by Macron to “clarify” the situation), the president was blindsided by the popularity of the left-wing coalition, the New Popular Front (NFP). It now has the largest bloc in the French parliament but cannot form a majority. Though it claimed electoral “victory” nonetheless. The result left a vacuum at the heart of French politics. This confused situation has been artificially prolonged by the so-called “Olympic truce” that Macron deployed to ensure maximum stability for the Olympic Games, when France was showcased to the world.
The appointment of Barnier has enraged the left, which has denounced Barnier’s post as a “coup d’état” and an “insult to democracy”. Demonstrations against Macron’s government are already being planned for as soon as tomorrow (7 September) under banners of “treason”, “betrayal” and “state theft” of the vote.
Barnier has long been a divisive figure. He is best known to the British as the stubborn and hard-headed Brexit negotiator who tortured the government of Theresa May – partly, it has been suggested, out of revenge for the Brexit vote (no less than Le Pen once described him as a “sadist who sought to inflict pain upon the British people”). In France, he is thought of as an old-school politician (one of “les classiques”, according to Le Figaro) whose patrician abrasiveness is only matched by his unpopularity; considered dry, cold and lacking in charisma. His party, the mainstream conservative Republicans, came a dismal fourth in the recent election, an indication of how the French electorate has rejected centre-right politics.
Le Pen, the most likely beneficiary of Barnier’s appointment has been rather guarded about the affair. As it stands, her RN party decides the balance of power in the French parliament: Macron will depend on Le Pen’s benevolence to hold off attacks from the left and ensure the smooth running of parliamentary business. Le Pen has no quarrel with Barnier and it is probably the case that, as the front page of Libération puts it, he has been “approved by Le Pen”. But she must be seen as standoffish, if only to preserve the distance that she carefully delineates between the National Assembly and Macron.
Outside the Assembly, there are some on the right who are sceptical about Barnier. The influential conservative magazine Causeur described Barnier as no more than a “withered technocrat”, predicting that he would do nothing more than stave off for a short period the inevitable collapse of the Macron government – which would allow for a National Assembly takeover of the parliament. According to Céline Pina in Causeur, this is another result of Macron’s love of what she calls “hyper-solutions”. It means the tendency to try and solve myriad problems with a single clever equation. This is, she writes, not only a form of magical thinking, which has been characteristic of Macron’s behaviour as president, but defies the complexity of real politics, is “immature” and, ultimately, as Macron’s recent brinkmanship has shown, dangerous for the stability of France.
Some – few – are optimistic about the new prime minister and his reputation as someone who gets things done, unaffected by the swirls and eddies of everyday parliamentary life. The theory is that Macron has appointed Barnier as an enforcer, someone who can drive a hard bargain (a reputation he burnished during the Brexit negotiations). According the political scientist Pascal Perrineau, speaking in the pages of Le Parisien, Barnier represents a new form of “cohabitation” (the term used in French for the alliance of a president and prime minister from two opposing parties). Barnier, coming from the right, will hold on to and defend Macron’s reforms on pensions, his fiscal policies and his hardening stance on immigration (Barnier is known for his own hard-line views on this issue). Perrineau says that the coming years will be “difficult” for Macron, but that Barnier, also known for his loyalty, may be the prime minister to restore a consensus.
For now this seems wishful thinking. The mood in the French parliament right is mutinous. Many ordinary French people are simply bitter and cynical, and have been for a long time. The feeling is best summed up by a cartoon in today’s Le Parisien: a middle-aged man, watching the television news with his wife, comments: “Well, Barnier is neither NFP, National Assembly nor Renaissance [Macron’s party].” His wife replies, “So that means we’ll never know who really won the election.”
[See also: The SNP’s reign is ending with a whimper]
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