France faces a crucial week to measure the health and stability of its Government. The new Prime Minister, Michel Barnier, will present a Budget this Thursday to extremely reduce public spending and achieve savings of 60 billion euros capable of taming the public deficit. Protests await him in the streets and in Parliament, where the New Popular Front (NFP), the bloc formed by left-wing parties, defended this Tuesday a motion of censure condemned in advance to fail. [solo obtuvo 197 votos de los 289 que habrían sido necesarios]but intended for a single symbolic purpose: to demonstrate that the Executive is maintained only with the support of Marine Le Pen.
The motion did not prosper, because the left only had 192 votes in a chamber of 577 and the rest of the groups had already announced that they would not support it. Especially, Le Pen, leader of the National Regroupment (RN), who expressed his intention to check if the progress of the Executive satisfied his party. And that rejection, according to the authors of the political move presented this Tuesday, was the grace of the staging. François Hollande himself explained its “theatrical” meaning to this newspaper in an interview. “The important thing is to show that the National Regroupment does not censure the Government, which remains standing only thanks to them,” said the former socialist president and now deputy.
The forecast came true on Tuesday afternoon at the Bourbon Palace headquarters, just after the leader of the Socialist Party, Olivier Faure, defended the benefits of the initiative and denounced “the electoral robbery” after the appointment of Barnier as prime minister. given that the New Popular Front (NFP) had come first in the July legislative elections.
“The violence of this democratic deviation cannot be ignored,” criticized the socialist deputy. “Yours is the Government of a destroyed party [Los Republicanos]supported by another formation that was defeated three times in a month and that is sustained thanks to the extreme right, which was rejected by two thirds of the French,” said the socialist leader.
Barnier, however, is a prime minister unmoved by criticism. Become the target of blows from the entire parliamentary spectrum – including a large part of the Macronists who support him – he endures without counterattacking because he has no choice. “This motion is not a surprise. “You warned me that they would put her in before I even opened my mouth,” he began. “There is no absolute majority for anyone. (…) Therefore, there are relative majorities. That is the choice of the French people. And, among the relative majorities, what I confirm (…) is that the relative majority that accompanies the Government is today the least relative,” he responded without barely twisting his face.
The RN, despite keeping the Executive alive, also shot Barnier. Guillaume Bigot, deputy of the far-right party, assured that his “group is burning with the desire to vote on the motion of censure” and that “he will have no qualms about voting for it tomorrow,” but that “he will not vote for it now.” The far-right deputy considered that Michel Barnier’s general policy statement contained “nothing very convincing, but nothing very shocking either.” Considering that “censorship is a serious act,” Bigot explained that his party does not want to “censor for the sake of censorship.”
Criticism from the left also came for the alleged adjustments that the next budgets will contain. The socialist leader criticized the government line advanced by Barnier, which aims to redirect public finances with 40,000 million euros of cuts and 20,000 million of additional income with tax increases on the richest. “The unemployed will suffer a new unemployment reform, retirees will see their pensions frozen, the sick will have to contribute a co-payment of four euros for a medical consultation (…) all our public services, education, hospital, security, will be affected, when they are already on the verge of exhaustion. “They want to do a lot with people who have little and almost nothing with those who have everything,” he summarized.
The feeling of fragility of this Government is total. But the reality is that no one has a clear alternative to Barnier right now and that it is in everyone’s interest that the old Brexit negotiator be the one who burns in the bonfire of widespread discontent. An early dissolution of the Assembly would now be detrimental to the majority of forces. The left needs time to rearm itself, especially a Socialist Party completely subordinated to the radical voice of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise. The far-right has accused the electoral coup of last July and its leader, Marine Le Pen, is in the middle of a process that could lead to her disqualification. And the Macronists need to regroup around a new leader and begin to distance themselves from Macron himself, already suffering from a progressive loss of power.