Reprinted from the UK Socialist website Left Horizons.

No end in sight to political crisis in France

14 December 2024Posted by Editor

By Greg Oxley of La Riposte

The nomination of François Bayrou as Prime Minister, replacing Michel Barnier, who was overthrown by a vote of no confidence earlier this month, solves nothing. The mountain has laboured and brought forth yet another mouse. Just as Barnier’s government was doomed from the outset, for lack of support in the National Assembly, Bayrou will no doubt suffer the same fate.

A former Justice Minister under Macron in 2017, Bayrou was forced to resign after being charged with “misappropriation of public funds”. His case is still going through the courts. The first task of the new government will be to get the Barnier’s budget through parliament. But how can that be done, given that Bayrou has no more support than Barnier? The institutional crisis is clearly far from over. It could well lead to the end of the presidency of Emmanuel Macron.

To understand how this situation came about, we have to go back to the events of June 2024. In the European elections of that month, Macron’s party suffered a crushing defeat, gaining only 14.6% of the vote, making him the most unpopular sitting president since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958.

That election also showed a further increase in the social basis of the right-wing nationalist party, the Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, which got 7.76 million votes (31.7%). The left parties, individually weak and bitterly divided, made a poor showing.

Snap election made matters worse for Macron

Macron’s response to his defeat was to dissolve the National Assembly (the French parliament), which provoked a snap election, a little more than two weeks later. He appealed to the electorate to give him a strong parliamentary base, as the only alternative to what he called “the extremes”, meaning the RN on the right and the left parties. The latter, alarmed by the upsurge in support for the RN, decided (literally overnight), to end years of squabbling and division by creating a broad alliance called the New Popular Front (NFP).

New Prime Minister, Bayrou was forced to resign after being charged with “misappropriation of public funds”. His case is still going through the courts. 

Macron’s ploy failed miserably, and instead of strengthening his position, it was weakened even further. On the far right, the RN won 33% of the vote, against 27% for the NFP. After the second round, the NFP emerged as the largest parliamentary group, followed by the RN. Macron only got 20%. Macron’s candidates won 168 seats, the other right-wing party, the Republicans (formerly that of Chirac and Sarkozy), got 66. The NFP won 180 and the RN won 143.

It took Macron no less than 60 days to name a Prime Minister, which he eventually chose from among the Republicans! Former PM, Dominique de Villepin, met the announcement by ironically recalling the words attributed to Jesus Christ in the book of Saint Matthew: “And the last shall be the first.”

Thus, the “zombie government” led by Michel Barnier was doomed to impotence from the outset. The budget he presented to parliament amounted to yet another round of the vicious cuts and austerity measures that Macron has pushed through since he first came to power in 2017.

Barnier lasted only three months

The NFP tabled a vote of no confidence, and the RN declared they would also vote against the government. Seeing that there was no chance they would get majority approval of the budget, Macron and Barnier used the infamous clause 49.3 of the Constitution, which allows a government to adopt laws without parliamentary support. However, the vote of no confidence still took place. The Barnier government fell three months after coming into existence, and the budget fell with it.

Finding himself back to square one, Macron had to find another Prime Minister, and Bayrou will now have to cobble together a new minority government, which will probably collapse in turn. How long can this go on?

Macron says he will not resign, that he will stay on until 2027. But it would seem that the only way he could do that would be through permanent institutional upheaval, or through ruling directly by presidential decree. Neither option is politically viable, and so it seems that sooner or later Macron is likely to resign, which will mean new presidential and parliamentary elections.

The social and economic backdrop to these developments is such that France is heading for a period of profound instability. When Macron came to power, he claimed to represent the political “centre”. Promoted as some kind of economic whizz kid, “breaking the mould of traditional politics”. He claimed he was neither left nor right, and would simply apply policies that ‘worked’, to guarantee job creation and prosperity, reduce inequality and unite the nation.

In practice, however, he carried out an implacable defence of capitalist interests at the expense of the rest of society. His first act was to reduce taxes on the super-rich amounting to €5bn of lost revenue for the state.

Then he attacked health and education. In the midst of the Covid pandemic, he closed nearly 18,000 hospital beds. A series of measures effectively cut pensions. He slashed benefits for the unemployed and the poorest sections in society. The numbers of the ‘officially poor’ rose to 14.4% of the population. Among families with three or more children, the percentage is 26%.

Macron adopted many of the policies of the far right

The economy has been stagnant since 2019 and GDP grew by just 0.8% in 2023 and is projected to grow by 1.1% in 2024. Inflation has been undermining living standards, driving many people to despair, as shown by the insurrectionary demonstrations and blockades of the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ in the winter of 2018-2019.

In an attempt to divert public anger away from the government and the capitalists, Macron adopted many aspects of the racist and nationalist policies advocated by Le Pen. His ‘”anti-separatism” laws framed sections of society deemed to be “not really French” as a potential internal threat, separate from and hostile to the interests of the ‘Nation’ and democratic values.

The police have been given sweeping powers, and increasingly deadly arms and equipment, to use in defence of ‘law and order’. Tens of thousands of job losses have been announced in the last few weeks alone. Companies like Michelin, after having received millions of euros in public subsidies and making record profits in 2023, has announced the closure of two factories and major cuts in the workforce.

Manufacturing industry accounts for only 10% of GDP. The working people are restless. Civil servants, teachers, workers in the agricultural sector, railways workers, moved into action. These movements are relatively low-key for the moment, but attitudes are hardening. Governmental chaos is unfolding amid social chaos.

The workers’ organisations will have to take bolder action in the future, and yet, unfortunately, growing anger in society has also seen widening of the social basis of right-wing nationalism. It can by no means be excluded that the next presidential and legislative elections could bring the RN to power. In the first round of the last legislative elections, more than 10.6 million people voted for the RN.

Tensions and failures among NFP leaders

The only force that can prevent an RN victory is the NFP left alliance. However, this alliance includes the Socialist Party whose right-wing elements are attempting to sabotage the NFP from within, and the Communist Party (PCF) whose leadership, around Fabien Roussel, has had a conciliatory attitude towards participation in a government – which would necessarily be a minority government – under Emmanuel Macron.

Tensions within the NFP, therefore, mean that the alliance may not survive long enough to face up to threat from the RN. Not only that, but the program of the NFP, despite the inclusion of a number of important social and economic reforms, is fundamentally flawed.

Previous left governments which tried to carry out social reforms, such as the socialist-communist government of 1981-1986, have been forced to abandon them and adopt policies in the interests of big business. They were not prepared to take decisive measures to break the power of the capitalists, which is rooted in private ownership of the banks, productive industry and distribution, and therefore had no means of fighting against capitalist sabotage. The program of the NFP, which contains no measures whatsoever to deal with this fundamental problem, shows that its leaders have learned nothing from the failures of the past.

Nationalist rise is an international phenomenon

 The rise of nationalism is an international phenomenon and is essentially a reaction to the social and economic consequences of capitalist “internationalism”, or globalisation. People are desperate. In France and elsewhere, workers have been let down by previous left governments. The trade unions have proved incapable of defending them in the face of declining living standards. Even the better off sections of society feel that they are losing ground.

The difficulties are not just financial. Many areas, especially rural areas, have seen a collapse of vital services such as public transport, post offices, schools and hospitals, not to speak of affordable housing and stable employment. It appears to many workers that globalisation has meant a loss of control, rendering governments impotent in the face of foreign competition and open borders.

Powerful forces are driving a trend towards protectionism and the notion of national “preference” or “priority”. In the minds of tens of millions of people, a major change is necessary, to put an end to social and economic decline. If the left cannot convince workers that it can and will bring about this change, then right-wing nationalism and racism will inevitably gain ground.

The struggle against this reactionary danger can only be waged and won by the emergence of a mass movement of the working people around bold socialist policies that strike at the roots of capitalist power and privilege, linking social reform to the need to expropriate the capitalist class and open the way for democratic planning in the interests of the mass of the population.

Greg Oxley is editor of the French marxist website, La Riposte, which can be found here. Pictures: from Wikimedia Commons, Macron (top) here and Francois Bayrou here, and NFP flags from NFP website here.