The new Prime Minister of France, the centrist François Bayrou, must begin to reveal the cards with which he plans to face the first and most important phase of his mandate. The approval of new budgets, exactly the place where his predecessor, Michel Barnier, derailed, will mark the scheme of alliances on which the head of the Government plans to rely in the coming months. If he does not want to end up like his predecessor, victim of a motion of censure from the left and the extreme right, he will have to convince the Socialist Party (PS) to support him. At what price? This Tuesday, in his first general policy speech, he must make his plan and priorities clear to prevent his Executive from derailing in the first curve of the mandate. Until Monday night, he held meetings with the socialists to try to convince them.
The socialists led by Olivier Faure, for now, have already assessed their support very clearly. If Bayrou wants to prevent his party from joining the more than likely motion of censure that will be launched by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise (LFI), he will have to review or cancel the pension reform approved in March 2023 which, among other things, it delayed the retirement age from 62 to 64 years. Reforming this law, the star project that President Emmanuel Macron managed to light up, is the same red line that The Ecologists have marked on the ground, another of the legs of the New Popular Front (NFP), an alliance of the left in the last legislative elections. .
Three months ago, the NFP was a solid bloc that did not agree to negotiate separately. Today, when all parties are beginning to be tired of instability and need to reorganize, an agreement on this issue between the Bayrou Government and the left that is beginning to distance itself from Mélenchon begins to seem feasible. “For the moment, the negotiations continue without anyone having left the table, neither the left nor the ‘common core’ that supports the prime minister,” the Government explains. “That is already a good sign,” they add. On Sunday afternoon another meeting took place at the headquarters of the Ministry of Economy between the head of the branch, Eric Lombard, and Los Ecologistas. There was also no slamming of the door, as on other occasions.
Breaking ties with Le Pen
The key to the operation that Bayrou designs is to avoid repeating the mistakes of his predecessor and trying to decouple the fate of his Government from the impulses of the far-right National Rally (RN), led by Marine Le Pen. The great challenge of Tuesday’s speech will have to raise this scheme, but measuring the aggressiveness against Le Pen so as not to lose her support definitively. The margin is very narrow. To act and, in the short term, finally manage to approve a budget for 2025, the prime minister and centrist mayor of Pau seeks to obtain the benevolent abstention of the left not linked to LFI, especially the socialists who, with their 66 deputies, are in a key position.
Last July, after the elections that accompanied the dissolution of the Assembly decreed by Macron, the NFP became the first force in Parliament, with 193 of 577 deputies, although it was far from the absolute majority of 289. The presidential bloc, formed by three center and center-right parties, it obtained 166; and the far-right National Regrouping, 126. The only way to move forward without the far-right would be to bow to Mélenchon’s most radical demands or break the unity of that bloc, something that the President of the Republic has already tried without success, and which is close to getting Bayrou now.
The socialists have sent a five-page letter with 40 proposals to guarantee their support. On the list of priorities, for socialists, environmentalists and communists alike, is the suspension or repeal of the pension reform, adopted by decree despite the opposition of the unions and the majority of French people. Many other measures are added to this crucial request: the socialists demand gestures of fiscal justice and an increase in the minimum wage, the environmentalists demand 7 billion euros of investments in the ecological transition. Some requests that go poorly with the cuts that the Government needs to make to stop the deficit and reduce the colossal French debt.
The question, then, will focus on pensions. But can Bayrou repeal the 2023 reform? So far he has ruled it out. Suspend its application while its terms are reviewed, especially the legal retirement age, which in the text is raised to 64 years? That’s more likely. But on the right, the issue is extremely sensitive. “Neither suspension nor repeal!” cried the president of the Republicans in the Senate, Gérard Larcher, on Saturday in Le Parisien. Suspending the reform without an alternative scenario would be equivalent to “jumping into the void without a parachute.” “It will be without the Republican right!” the leader of the Republican deputies, Laurent Wauquiez, added on Sunday in the same newspaper.
The novelty is that Macron, the intellectual author of the reform and its controversial approval method, has implied that the suspension would be a way to avoid a blockade or a new fall of the Government. The problem would be the way in which it is done and its legal fit.
