Emmanuel Macron wants a break. At least a fortnight: the time of the Olympic Games, which opened on Friday and end on August 11. Olympic truce, they call it. Summer break. As it coincides with the holidays, and the French will either be disconnected from current events or will be immersed in sporting competitions, the volume of anger is likely to be reduced. For how long?
None of the uncertainties surrounding France’s future have been resolved since the legislative elections on July 7. First of all, who will govern the country and draft the next budget, which must be approved by a National Assembly divided into three blocs, none of which have a majority that would allow them to govern without alliances. New legislative elections cannot be called until June 2025.
There is a fundamental problem: no one agrees on what the election result meant. Everyone has their own story and there is no way to make them agree.
The New Popular Front (NPF), which includes everyone from the radical left of La France Insoumise (LFI) to the Socialist Party (PS), has 193 seats out of 577. The presidential bloc, made up of three centre-right and centre-right parties, has 166. The far-right National Rally (RN) has 126. The Republicans (LR), a traditional right-wing party linked to the Spanish PP and renamed the Republican Right, has 47. The threshold for an absolute majority is 289 seats.
The Left believes it has won the election. After days of internal squabbling, this week they agreed on a name to be Prime Minister. It is the hitherto unknown Lucie Castets, a senior civil servant at Paris City Hall.
For Macron, no one has won, a diagnosis that angers the left. He has ruled out, as the NPF demands, appointing Castets and asking him to form a government. Macron believes that, as there is no bloc with a majority, a majority coalition should be formed with deputies from the centre, the left and moderate right. This would be, in his opinion, the mandate of the ballot boxes.
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For some Macronists and the moderate right of the former Republicans, the mandate is something different. They believe that the French have become right-wing and that the future government should respond to this reality. They point out that, if there is to be a minority government, one formed by the Macronist centre and the moderate right would have more seats than one formed by the NFP.
The only party not claiming the right to govern, even though it was the one that received the most votes on 7 July, is Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. It has not questioned the legitimacy of the result either.
What happened on July 7? And how to proceed after the Olympic break? “The first point, to understand the situation, is the defeat of the Executive, of the President of the Republic,” says Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, former first secretary of the Socialist Party. “And we are entering a phase of decomposition, because there is no viable solution.”
Cambadélis analyses the possible solutions. The first is that Macron, as the left demands, appoints Castets as prime minister. “But Castets would be incapable of forming a government. If [el NFP] “It took her 15 days to name a candidate for prime minister…”, she warns. “And if she were to succeed, she would be defeated by a vote of no confidence.”
In France, unlike in Spain, a new prime minister takes office as soon as the president appoints him, without the Constitution requiring a vote of confidence. Therefore, it is not strictly necessary for a majority to prevail. But this prime minister falls if a motion of censure against him is successful.
Stéphane Vojetta, recently re-elected as a centrist MP for the constituency of French residents in Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Monaco, is clear about how he would vote in the event of a vote of no confidence against a NPF government. “If it included a minister from La France Insoumise,” he says, “I would support it without a doubt.”
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI party is now dominant on the left. But for some French people, like Le Pen’s RN, it is outside the republican consensus because of its radicalism and its positions on the EU, NATO, the free market economy and the conflict in the Middle East. Vojetta predicts: “It is a government that would last three days.”
The NFP’s argument for claiming the right to govern and implement its programme is that, by tradition, it is whoever wins the elections who is responsible for forming a government. Macron should therefore appoint Castets and allow the left to govern. And it is true that the NFP is clearly the bloc that won the most seats in the legislative elections. But the Macronists reply that it is one thing to be the group with the most seats and another to have enough seats to govern.
“To explain to the French that just because you came first in an election doesn’t mean you have won enough to be able to govern,” says Vojetta, “I use the comparison with what happened in Spain a year ago.” In the Spanish legislative elections of July 2023, Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP was the first party in votes and deputies, but it was unable to build a majority to govern and it was the socialist Pedro Sánchez who ended up being invested as president of the Government.
Does the left not have the right to try to govern as the first bloc? “Definitely!” Vojetta replies. But he adds: “Let them try to convince the central bloc to join them in a parliamentary alliance. To do so, they will have to make compromises on their programme and the composition of the government, because no one will join them with their current discourse, according to which only the NFP can govern and must approve the entire programme and nothing but the programme.”
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, a socialist but critical of the current leadership, said this week during a meeting with journalists before Castets’ appointment: “We must not lie to the people. With 28% in the legislative election, although that is very good, and 31% of seats, we do not have a majority. Especially when Mr Mélenchon and Mr Olivier Faure are in power, we are not going to be able to vote for the majority.” [primer secretario del PS] and others explain that the entire program of the New Popular Front must be applied and nothing more than the program of the New Popular Front.”
One alternative that Cambadélis mentions would be a government of the Macronist bloc with the traditional right. If the NFP has 193 deputies, this coalition would have 213, somewhat closer to the majority of 289, but would be exposed to a vote of no confidence from the left and the extreme right. He also sees a grand coalition that would bring together the left, the centre and the moderate right as unlikely. The centre and the right would demand that the socialists, ecologists and communists break with Mélenchon, and they do not seem willing to do so.
All this will be on the table from mid-August, when the Olympic celebrations are over. With Macron as judge and jury, as his rivals criticise: referee, but at the same time with a clear idea that he wants a coalition government, pro-European and in continuity with economic policies. And with leaders like Mélenchon on the left or the conservative Laurent Wauquiez on the right who are thinking about the presidential elections. “However you look at it,” says the former leader of the PS, Cambadélis, “we are faced with an impossibility of governing.”
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