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Macron standing with all of his political allies. Photo by AMAURY CORNU/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images.
After three months of a Barnier government, it seems that France is back to square one. This week, as predicted, a coalition of the Left allied with Le Pen’s far-Right acted to bring it down. It was not an auspicious tenure: Barnier broke records only for being the shortest-serving Prime Minister of the Fifth Republic and the first since 1962 to fall after a vote of no confidence. It was a moment of high political drama. But après Barnier — what?
Multiple reasons were given by those who voted to bring it down. Marine Le Pen fulminated against his focus on tax rises as the only way to balance the books. The far-Left’s Éric Coquerel denounced the Prime Minister for being both illegitimate and unpopular. The leader of Les Républicains, Laurent Wauquiez, from the same political family as Barnier, accused the Left and the far-Right of putting the interests of their parties ahead of those of the government.
Wauquiez is right that there has been no principled critique of the Barnier Government, and no alternative platform even proposed. Both sides just wanted him gone, having rejected his right to be there in the first place. No doubt Barnier carried some hubris from Brussels to Matignon; but as he has learnt to his cost, governing as French Prime Minister bears little resemblance to the job of an EU envoy.
So with Barnier defenestrated, Macron’s neck is on the line. Given that he is unable to dissolve the National Assembly because the rules state that a year must elapse between dissolutions, he must find a Prime Minister who can hold a government together at least until next June.
Various names have been circulating, some had been sounded out and rejected by Macron over the summer. François Baroin from the centre-right, the Macronist ally François Bayrou. Or Bernard Cazeneuve, a former socialist Prime Minister. Macron needs a moderate; someone who can unify the opposing political blocs at least until they can vote in favour of a much-needed budget. This was why Barnier was picked in the first place: it was believed he had the numbers. Macron and his cronies are now back in the President’s spacious Elysée office, calculator in hand, doing the maths. Crucially, any opposition to a new Prime Minister must not go above the fateful 288, the number of votes needed to win a no-confidence vote in the parliament.
For the fate of the next Prime Minister will depend on this number. Are the political parties prepared to compromise, or do they want to use this crisis to obtain the ultimate prize: the fall of Macron himself? Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National (RN) held back from openly calling for Macron’s resignation. However, she did make it clear that he should consider whether “he is in a position to stay or not”. On the Left, the leaders of La France Insoumise (LFI) have made no bones about wanting the President’s departure. This would fix the current impasse in brutal fashion by triggering new presidential and legislative elections.
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SubscribeFrom a Cambridge university professor of modern politics, I would expect a bit more insight into THE fundamental change of our time: left and right have lost all meaning. The new split is between the establishment and their populist opponents. That is why it is also completely nonsensical to speak of a centre. There is no centre like there is no centre in the question whether a woman is pregnant or not.
Among the personalities who I have listened to recently, are Ben Habib, Michael Shellenberger and Peter Thiel. Their views on today’s liberalism are very interesting and, so I believe, the key to what needs to change: the trend to outsource societal/political key decisions to international bodies and unaccountable bureaucracies needs to be reverted in its entirety.
Nail on head. Hopefully this dawning reality might be about to produce more leaders who can present to electorates the clear vision you have encapsulated.
What are the components of your ‘establishment’? Would it include the traditional ‘left’. They are still to be found in various places (though I don’t include the faux left like Novara Media).
I believe that the establishment is not so much a conscious effort with clearly defined goals, but rather a sort of collective psycho-dynamic with several origins: marxists, corporatists, us foreign policy bureaucrats and probably a few others.
The found out that they have a lot in common and they can each achieve some of their central goals by cooperating. That translates into globalism.
Look into the 2030 agenda of the united nations (sustainable development goals). it reads like a modern version of the ideology of Benito Mussolini: a class of leaders decide for everybody what is best for them and the people don’t have any say in it. That’s why they outsource all important political and societal decisions to international organizations and other unaccountable bureaucracies.
No matter what side you are on (traditional left or right or anything else), there is exactly one central question: do you believe in democracy ?
Democracy means that the people have the last say in what policies are enacted and which ones are revoked. Any configuration that removes this choice from the voters, is not democratic.
The establishment today is therefore undemocratic in nature, and the populists the establishment sneers at so much, are the ones who try to restore democracy.
I agree with all your points. The idea of a realignment away from the traditional boss / worker one seems to have gone unnoticed by today’s politicians (or at least they are pretending it has). The question becomes, is democracy the best form of government for the future (one of artificial intelligence, too few jobs for too many people, huge global companies, mass immigration…..).
What happens if the vast majority don’t want a world, a globalists world, ‘of artificial intelligence, too few jobs for too many people, huge global companies, mass immigration…..’ ?
Have you forgotten why democracies have been so successful? And Free Speech, with a common understanding of what a civil society expects?
I remember when car workers downed tools for apparently little reason, in the 1960s, and later. The problem was that building cars ‘the old way’ wasn’t acceptable: it has been solved by having robots, with highly paid technicians building and maintaining them. But only with Flexibility and Free Speech can we adapt. And our current Socialist Establishment cannot cope with that. They live in a Static World, where only they can make changes, and where they can ignore any consequences. 🙂
And about ‘artificial intelligence’: it only artificial. It’s an imitation. It cannot explain, so while it can help the knowledgeable, it will mislead the ignorant and arrogant: just like the BBC does.
Moreover, artificial intelligence isn’t going to replace plumbers, roofers, pipe fitters, electricians, or any of those other occupations that require knowledge, experience, skill, and a set of opposable thumbs that doesn’t run on electrical energy produced by either fossil fuels or the not quite existing yet replacements for fossil fuels. It will, however, replace a lot of wildly overpaid bureaucrats, designers, clerks, and analysts sitting at desks in the world’s capitals and corporate headquarters. I’m genuinely amused when I see a commercial of some tech company trying to sell AI to hip young college grads by showing some hip young person using their AI to compress hours of work into a couple of commands and then looking like a genius for doing so. My initial reaction was, “why do we need the hip young person at all if the AI did the work”? If I’m asking the question, I can guarantee you there’s a dozen corporate executives asking the same thing, and they’ll have no more loyalty to the hip young people that work for them now than they had for the laborers who worked for them in past decades.
These overpaid college indoctrinated tech savvy fools actually think their education elevates them above the common folk. They don’t realize they’re peasants just as much as the yellow vest protestor or the MAGA hat hillbilly. It’s going to be a bitter pill to swallow when they realize that a machine can now do their jobs just as well as they can, or better. What was all that college education for again? How about all that student load debt? Still worth it? Perhaps when they’re the ones standing in the unemployment line or facing the prospect of working at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart for the rest of their lives and calling it a career, they’ll understand what all those factory workers and protesters were going on about. Walking a few miles in another man’s shoes can be an enlightening experience.
That a thoughtful and worthwhile comment such as this attracts a down-tick actually makes me genuinely curious as to what has moved them to this act. Why not post instead your concerns?
I suspect that most of the downtickers who don’t give an explanation lack confidence in their intellectual capability to maintain a debate.
I often wonder about that. Uptick this comment for good luck in 2025.
Not forgetting experts, the financial and tech elites and academia
While you are right in a sense there is a strong element of popularism v. the establishment, to also claim that “left and right have lost all meaning” is clearly not true. Are you honestly suggesting that the FN/NR are the same as LFI and the NPF? That is evidently not the case.
Agreed Chris.
I’ve heard quite a bit from Thiel and he is bang on. People feel disenfanchised because they are disenfanchised.
Some politicians know this and weasle their way around the problem with long winded, word salad defences. Others, such as Two Tier here in the UK, are more or less reading from a prepared script, which is why he is so tetchy and short tempered when picked up on the weakness of his arguments. He has ran out of script on these occasions.
As for Macron, that man seems to live in a parallel universe, where everyone loves him, everyone sees his wisdom, and the French people cry out for a change in the French system so that he can rule for ever.
Part of being disenfranchised is because we do not have Informed Discussion. It’s not just that we don’t know what goes on in Government, it’s that there are so many uninformed participating, it’s easy for the discussion to become fantasy.
Technology is based on Science, Engineering, Business and Common Sense. Well, it’s supposed to, but the Political Bubble think otherwise: you just need to tell a good narrative to succeed.
Indeed. In what I consider a delicious irony, anti-globalism has gone global. The French people want to decide who leads France and be in charge of the government of France. The American people want a President who prioritizes the needs of Americans, not Ukrainians or the millions of people living here illegally. These national populist movements bear little resemblance to one another and don’t really agree on much because there’s no unity nor any wish for there to be. French populists want what’s best for France. American populists want what’s best for America. Germans for Germany, and so on. They don’t need to agree because they’re not trying to govern the whole world under one set of rules.
The globalists have no answer for any of it because they’re trying to make the best system for everyone collectively. They might actually be right. Their way might be, on average, the best way if everyone followed their rules. That just wasn’t a realistic expectation. Middle America was not going to watch the factories close and not demand a reckoning nor give up their SUVs because of the temperature in Guatemala. France was not going to see their taxes go up and their benefits go down without protesting and taking to the streets as the French are wont to do. China was never going to do anything but use their raw demographic power and totalitarian state to game the system to their advantage in whatever way possible in revenge for all the ‘humiliation’ they suffered at the hands of ‘colonialists’. In the light of reality, we’re back to square one, which is people expecting elected governments to be their defenders and their advocates against the vagaries and uncertainties of a ‘global economy’ and the predatory actions of rival nations. History will likely record the globalist era from 1992-present as a noble but futile effort and a colossal waste of time and resources.
Brexit and Trump were the first shots fired and now the avalanche is running down the mountain. It can’t be stopped or reversed. Biden (or whoever was actually in charge, maybe his wife) couldn’t stop it, though to his credit he actually at least made some concessions to economic nationalism to attempt to forge a new path. Macron, on the other hand, has compromised very little and instead used political strategy to maintain his hold on power. Rather than come up with any new ideas or policies, He built his coalition around the fear of extremism from both the left and right and forgot that in order to govern, you need to have an actual plan as to what to do and have some actual public support behind it. He strategized and maneuvered himself right into a corner where he has the office and the trappings of power but he’s powerless to actually do much of anything. He is now trapped in that corner with enemies on all sides, enemies who do have some segment of the public solidly, and angrily, behind them. All round the world, the chickens of globalism are indeed coming home to roost.
Honest question: given that Le Pen’s party has about 1/3 of the seats, how can it be *far* right? Where are then the “right” and the “centre right” and the “centre”?
The Right is France is The Gaullists, the Republicans etc.
The Centre Right is Macron and his pro-market neo-liberals.
The Centre is doesn’t have a good example in France
The prevailing media narrative is that everything which is not explicitly leftist, preferably as far left as possible, is right by definition. And not just plain ole righty right. It has to be far right or extreme right or even extreme far-right. It is seldom that “right” flies alone.
or, to give them their full title, “far right thugs”
What is generally thought of as the centre has moved left in the last 40 years, what would have been considered fairly ordinary traditional conservative views back in the 80s are now seen, by the mainstream media at least, as far right, while what were hard left views are now centrist.
This is why today you often hear ideas and people dismissed as ‘far right’ but their more left wing counterparts are never characterised as far left or hard left.
Really? Up to the 1970s, in the UK at least, the Conservatives were “One Nation”, supporters of the welfare state etc etc, very Centre Right, not Right. The Conservative Party moved significantly to the Right under Margaret Thatcher. Labour then moved to the Right. Under Foot is was very Left and even under Kinnock much more Left than now, and until the blip that was Corbyn the Labour Party was Centrist – barely Left in following many of Thatchers market ideas, was often Centre Right.
So, no, the centre has not moved Left at all. It has moved Right.
Another guest on the Dewbs & Co programme called Ben Habib Far Right to his face the other day. The terms are now meaningless when misused in this way.
I love the caption to the photo: ‘Macron standing with all of his political allies’.
Remember Macron entered politics to occupy the centre ground when the Socialists and Gaullists had been thoroughly discredited. He created an artificial party and ruled with it in the interests of his former employers. Rothschilds en Marche! He has merely delayed the swing to the extremes in French politics by 10 years.
But first he had to dispose of Fillon, the centre-right candidate. And thus the right wing had to coalesce elsewhere.
Fillon had committed heresy, partly to try to woo some of the popular sentiment he observed was being successfully courted by Le Pen et al, he had begun to toy with some mildly Eurosceptic ideas. That simply could not be allowed so they destroyed him and created Macron.
Will the EU force a haircut on France in the way Greece was punished?
Not holding my breath.
When your moody teenager goes on a bender and nearly bankrupts the household, you can ground him and take away his allowance, force him to get a job at the local Burger King, etc etc.
When your wife goes on a bender and nearly bankrupts the household, your only real option is divorce.
Perhaps the ungovernability of modern democratic states isn’t a bug, but a feature.
This is something that needs far more serious attention and consideration. Is “democracy” inherently unstable?
That’s something that rival systems seem to believe, and also is it something our own technocratic elites (epitomised by Macron) appear to believe. Thus, their actions seek to pretend otherwise in order to maintain the illusion of legitimacy.
So where do we go from here? The same conditions apply in the UK and even more so in the EU (Brexit being an attempt to restore true democratic legitimacy). We look to the US to see what will happen over the next four years.
It is. Although to be fair it has been given serious attention since the time of Aristotle, although perhaps not some much in recent years. In his theory of States, democracy was the more imperfect of the two forms of government by the people, the better form being a polity.
Aristotle saw the weakness of democracy primarily as the tranny of the majority, particularly in the context of soaking the rich. If the majority voted to confiscate the wealth of rich and redistribute, why ultimately would the rich stand for it?
The other problem that democracies have created for themselves is the trickling abnegation of power to both supranational and non governmental bodies, thereby putting both budgets and democratic oversight beyond the influence of the voters.
Democracy could be more stable if a) there was some linkage between vote share and contribution, and b) all budgetary and policy control was firmly retained within the ambit of the government.
Being blessed/cursed with “un exécutif à deux têtes”, Barnier’s resignation is simply not enough.
Macron must resign without delay or obfuscation. His presidency is hugely discredited domestically and internationally, he the architect of his own deep-rooted unpopularity.
The French people are quite plainly not “his people”, and democracy demands a fresh plebiscite, in the new Trump/Le Pen/Meloni/Orban era.
Vive la révolution!
“Aristotle saw the weakness of democracy primarily as the tranny of the majority…”
I hope that was a mistake because we’ve definitely reached that point…
– that, I confess, was clearly a Freudian slip . . .
With respect to your reference to the US: The House of representatives cycles every 2 years, the Senate has 1/3 every 2 years, and the presidency every 4 years. This means that that events in America will “unfold”.
Yes, and thanks for that further insight.
France is not a ‘modern democratic state’. It is ultimately governed from Frankfurt by the European Central Bank – whose bureaucrats will be the ones who decide, with a nod from Berlin, when it’s time for this farce to stop.
Everybody seems to look back at the halcyon days of Democracy, which probably didn’t exist for more than a few years after everyone had the vote, and then because of the ‘intrusion’ of the Labour Party after WWI.
Does Democracy = Majority? No, because minorities would be trampled under foot. So, it means rule by political parties, following an election. But before the election the parties lie and cheat and everybody knows that. So you vote for A because he/she speaks well, or B because he/she dresses or C because they share my religion or D because they support my minority action group….
We have had the above for many years but the internet and live TV have finally finished off the big D. Now we can see the bast*rds telling lies to our faces. We can see all of the cracks and wrinkles and falsehoods and we feel powerless to do anything about it.
I keep going back to Richard Crossman, who single-handedly destroyed grammar schools because they were élitist. Every day he used to lunch in very expensive restaurants and every weekend he returned to his estate in the country – with many acres, cooks, servants, etc. Today he would be exposed by cameras following him about and details of his estate would be broadcast for all to see – another example of corruption. That was Democracy in the 60s. So when were the good years?
The good ole days weren’t always good. Tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.
–Billy Joel
Maybe democracy was always just a con waiting to unravel.
There’s the rub – by not allowing LFI to appoint a prime minister, even though the names they had put forward were very much establishment, and imposing Barnier, Macron has made very clear that he will not permit anyone else to exercise power.
The only path toward exercising power is to remove Macron.
Why, even on a non-MSM site like this, is Le Pen’s party always automatically called ‘far-right’? It isn’t anywhere near as far right as Melenchon’s lot are far left.
They have endeavored to move themselves to the centre, but their background is textbook far right. I mean, former leader Jean Marie Le Pen was a Vichyist.
France has three underlying problems. The Divine Right of Kings has become the Divine Right of politicians and civil servants; the exercise of the Droit Administratif and individual selfishness.
A country develops when people can think beyond self, family, village and valley; beyond what can be seen or travelled in a day by foot. Who take risks and accept responsibility.
In France, the vast majority of people think they are special and as consequence are entitled to special treatment. The last person to create a nation out of the French was Napoleon. Both Left and Right have financial plans where spending far exceeds income in order to pamper their supporters who all consider themselves special and entitled to special treatment.
France is little different from UK and the rest of Europe. What no one can bear to say – and Macron is as guilty as anyone here – is that the post 1945 model is gone. In a sense social democracy is dead – or has to take a completely new form. Deficits of the sort France (and the UK) run are not sustainable and there is no way out but to decide what the state will not fund… That is something so hateful to electors (look at the confected nonsense over winter fuel payments that everyone agrees were a waste of resources; or the utter madness of France’s retirement system which the Socialists still this morning pretend they can find a way to fund in pre-Macron form). No one will vote for this sort of radical reform until a country really hits the buffers – De Gaulle ’58 is a good model: rule be decree until you’re through the worst of the crisis… So sadly, things will get a lot worse before they get better [And this is not to even mention the fury that the Mercosur trade deal being done under Macron’s nose will provoke in rural France even while it lowers absurdly high French food prices].
Someone said the spirit of France wa broken at Verdun. If one looks at France in the 1920s and 1930s the divides were too great to produce a unified country in 1939 which Hitler realised.
I think De Gaulle did wonders in uniting the various factions but he neeeded the groups to think less of themselves and more of France.
‘absurdly high French food prices’
I suppose you’re referring to food produced in France itself given that Aldi, Lidl etc are doing a roaring trade there selling affordable food. Remember that food is to the French what cars are to the Germans….they are prepared to spend a disproportionate amount of their disposable income on it for cultural reasons and believe that they do it better than anyone else.
I don’t think it has ever been fully explained what is so ‘extreme’ about the RN (other than past family links). Barnier himself once proposed a moratorium on immigration, so it can’t be immigration.
I can see what is ‘extreme’ about a political faction allying with radical Islam, demanding unachievable Net Zero policies, or espousing gender ideology, but not generally speaking ‘RW populists’.
The terminology (right, left, hard xxx, far xxx, extreme xxx) has become so outdated as to be ridiculous, and completely useless in evaluating the political positions of any party or individual within them. Let’s come up with some new definitions please.
Given the current turmoil of French politics, I am reminded of the old, but true, saw regarding an accurate description of Hell:
Police are German
Cooks are British
Politicians are French.
High time you embarked on a culinary tour of the UK, sir.
No need to get defensive. Sounds pretty funny to me!
I may be mistaken but I think there was touch of irony there?
I heard a variation where the lovers were German.
The one I heard was that the comedians were German…
Hell is British cooks, German Police, French Civil Servants, Swiss lovers and it is run by Italians. Heaven is British Police, French cooks, built by German, Italian lovers and run by Swiss.
“a coalition of the Left allied with Le Pen’s far-Right”
Er, either they’re both ‘far’ or neither are.
Wrong. The left coalition comprises the PS (centre left) and Melenchon’s far left LFI while Le Pen’s RN is just one party.
« This would fix the current impasse in brutal fashion by triggering new presidential and legislative elections » this is not correct since from a constitutional stand point no new legislative elections can be called before July 2025. So even if a new presidential election was called before July 2025 the new elected President would not be able to dissolve the current parliament and as it stands no new elected President would have a majority in the current parliament. Macron by calling legislative elections in 2024 just created a constitutional crisis which will have far reaching consequences.
So, only ‘radicals’ could possibly find issue with the Macron govt. What a measured perspective. Perhaps the good professor could find one of his chums in the economics department and ask about this line: “Marine Le Pen fulminated against his focus on tax rises as the only way to balance the books.”
There is seldom an only way to do anything. This include budgets, which have two components: money in and money out. Apparently, the idea that balancing things might require addressing spending is something beyond Mr. Bickerton’s comprehension.
Never mind that every household, every private concern, and even some govts – those who cannot endlessly borrow – must watch spending AND income. Both things. It’s like being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, an ability that is evidently lost when one enters the public arena.
He can put in B Cazeneuve now as Premier ministre.
He should have done that in August to reflect the majority for the Left in the National Assembly. But he is a young man of consistently poor judgement.
Both the Gaullist centre-right and Parti socialiste soft left need reviving if the V Republic is to survive. They have 2 and a half years to achieve that now before the presidential elections.
Faure refused Cazeneuve back in the summer…. so he wasn’t an option – and Faure has only this morning begun to realise that there might be other options for the socialists than life as M. Melenchon’s doormat
Macron has been arguing for French troops on the ground in Ukraine,… nothing radical to see here folks.. move along now…
I would have expected a Cambridge professor to have understood that the Poujadiste Rassamblement National with its leftist economic policy is not far-right. Confused, of doubtful competence, perhaps. Its concerns over immigration, integration and crime resonate with voters.