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MICHEL BARNIER IS IN OFFICE, MARINE LE PEN WILL HOLD POWER  
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David Broder
September 6, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ Emmanuel Macron has appointed Michel Barnier as France’s prime
minister, after securing Marine Le Pen’s agreement. The creation of
a government reliant on her blessing is another step in the far
right’s march toward power. _

Michel Barnier during a speech at the Hotel Matignon in Paris,
France, on September 5, 2024. , (Nathan Laine / Bloomberg via Getty
Images)

 

As results poured in from the first round of France’s elections on
June 30, veteran Gaullist politician Michel Barnier sounded the alarm.
His Les Républicains seemed faced with a debacle, with under 7
percent of the vote. Ahead of the election, the party had suffered a
damaging split, as a noisy minority made an alliance with Marine Le
Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN). Barnier opposed their position
— but likewise warned against
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left-wing danger to the Republic.

 

In the second round, he insisted, it was necessary “to build a
barrage against both LFI [Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing France
Insoumise] and the RN.” This contravened the established idea of a
“republican front” uniting democrats against the far right. Yet in
dozens of constituencies, the runoffs on July 7 offered a straight
contest between France Insoumise and Le Pen’s RN. In those races,
Les Républicains’ voters split in favor of the far-right option, by
an estimated 38 to 26 percent
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No longer considering it a pariah, they backed it even against the
more center-left Greens and Socialists.

These Les Républicains voters were too few to give Le Pen a majority.
Most left-wingers (and just over half of centrists) voted tactically
to block her party, and surprised expectations that it was coasting
toward power. Ultimately, the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire scored
192 seats, Emmanuel Macron’s camp 166, and Le Pen’s allies only
142, in a deeply divided parliament. Yet the president soon gave the
far right the initiative again — handing it a kingmaker role that
culminated this Thursday in Barnier’s appointment as prime minister.

While the president last week ruled out a government led by the
left-wing alliance, his consultations with Le Pen in effect sought her
approval before a new broad-right administration could form. Le Pen
threatened “no-confidence” votes on potential candidates who might
make deals with the center-left, or even a right-winger hated by her
party like Xavier Bertrand
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But she told Macron that she would _not _immediately no-confidence a
Barnier government, instead publicly demanding that it should
“respect” her RN’s agenda and its over ten million voters.

When Macron called this snap vote in June, despite his party’s
dismal poll scores, it seemed that he was finding a way to ease the
far right into governmental responsibility, even under his presidency.
With the Rassemblement National easily topping preelection polls, its
victory appeared to be the most likely outcome. The second-round
results on July 7, seemed to subvert such prognoses. Yet ultimately,
they were right all along. Barnier, from France’s fourth-largest
political bloc, is now to be premier, both allied to Macronites and
dependent on Le Pen’s favor.

 

The Left is denouncing a betrayal of the Nouveau Front Populaire’s
electoral success. For Mélenchon, the president is “denying the
result of the election that he himself called.” France Insoumise’s
leader in the European Parliament, Manon Aubry, likewise said
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the “results from the ballot box have been erased” and spoke of
“Barnier [being] appointed prime minister with the far right’s
blessing.” While some on the most centrist wing of the Socialist
Party may have favored a broad government spanning center-left and
center-right, in the main the parties in this left-wing alliance
claimed that the July 7 result expressed a popular demand for a turn
to the Left.

The creation of a government reliant on Le Pen’s blessing is another
stage in the “mainstreaming” of her party by elites who once
promised to fight it.  But there is a deeper logic to Macron’s
choice. Barnier has been picked in order to pass a budget — a
difficult task given not only France’s fragmented parliament but
also the European disciplinary procedures looming over a country with
the EU’s biggest debt (in absolute terms) and a 5.5 percent deficit.
Even beyond his record as an EU institutional figure able to curry
favor in Brussels, Barnier surely does have a greater chance than the
Left to form an ad hoc majority for his spending plans, perhaps
reliant on the abstention of RN parliamentarians who themselves
promise sobriety in the public accounts.

Some of Barnier’s hard-right positions, trumpeted in his Les
Républicains primary bid ahead of the 2022 presidential election, are
amenable to convergences with the Le Pen camp. In that contest, he
aired the idea of a three-to-five-year moratorium on migration to the
EU, the return of military service, and army patrols in communities
where the police are said to have lost control. In response to his
appointment, Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal — in general a more
hard-line anti-immigration radical — called on
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prime minister to live up to these past promises. In that campaign,
Barnier like most other Les Républicains candidates also favored
raising the pension age to sixty-five.

In choosing to “not no-confidence” Barnier, Le Pen seeks to put on
a display of institutional responsibility. An albeit limited
comparison could be made with Giorgia Meloni’s approach toward the
Italian “national unity” government led by former central banker
Mario Draghi in 2021–22, where she insisted that she would adopt a
“constructive” rather than “party-political” approach, and in
general avoided harsh criticism of the technocrat. Such a rhetorical
position allowed Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia to rake in voters from
other parties dissatisfied with the government (the other main
right-wing forces had joined Draghi’s coalition) while also
posturing as serious and ready for high office.

But the differences also matter. Unlike in that Italian case, the
French far right has to contend with a considerable left-wing
opposition, which will be sure to highlight its complicity with
anti-social, budget-cutting policies. This especially matters since
this government arrives not in a period of fiscal stimulus but of
looming austerity, as EU authorities shut off the taps of
post-pandemic spending. Judging by the recent election campaign, the
RN will likely navigate this by adopting a two-faced position:
demanding a budget rebate from the EU, accepting that big spending
plans like a reduction of the pension age must be “delayed for
now,” and calling for cuts to target the categories it most
demonizes.

In any case, we can be sure that this arrangement has a short shelf
life, and that Le Pen will not be tying herself into this position for
the whole period up to the 2027 presidential election. This is a
stopgap government, well short of a majority in the National Assembly
and quite possibly destined to end with fresh elections in ten
months’ time. It may be that Le Pen has boxed herself into a corner
and that parts of her base will demand a more intransigent opposition
to Barnier. But likely far more will see the Rassemblement National
exerting increasing influence over France’s government, and breaking
down the previous dams against it.

_David Broder is Jacobin’s Europe editor and a historian of French
and Italian communism._

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* France
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* Politics
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* far right
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* Jean-Luc Mélenchon
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* Marine Le Pen
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* Emmanuel Macron
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