Michel Barnier, the man who ran circles round the British side during the Brexit negotiations, faces an imminent exit of his own – as Prime Minister of France.
He will almost certainly lose a motion of no confidence in the French National Assembly today, bringing an ignominious end to his three-month premiership – the shortest in the history of the Fifth Republic (established by Charles de Gaulle in 1958) and the first PM to be ousted by France’s parliament since 1962.
In truth, it’s not clear anybody could have done any better. Ever since President Macron, in an unfathomable rush of blood to the head, called parliamentary elections he had no need to call in the summer, France has been stumbling in the direction marked ‘ungovernable’.
Barnier, appointed PM by Macron in early September, largely because the President couldn’t find anybody else to take the job, struggled manfully to come up with £50 billion of spending cuts and tax rises to get a grip of France’s ballooning budget deficit, which was under five per cent of GDP two years ago, is now over six per cent and heading for an unsustainable seven per cent in a couple of years.
But Barnier couldn’t get parliament to back his austerity measures. Ever since the unnecessary elections, the National Assembly has been dominated by three groups: the hard Right National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen; the hard Left New Popular Front, whose totemic figurehead is perennial Corbynista firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon; and what’s left of Macron’s centrist supporters.
None is big enough to give any government a majority. An alliance between, say, two of the three is out of the question since they all hate each other too much to cooperate. Macron’s foolish election gambit has resulted in nothing but a debilitating political stalemate.
Barnier knew it was hopeless trying to get the first part of his budget through parliament so he invoked article 49.3 of the constitution which essentially makes it law by decree.
That inevitably triggered a motion of no confidence from the Mélenchon mob. Barnier’s goose was cooked when Le Pen said she too had no confidence in him.
His likely demise means his budget collapses, too. Macron is already looking for a new PM.
Barricades made of metal boards, dustbins and fires were hastily erected in Paris as police responded to protesters in April last year
A protester throws a tear gas canister during clashes with police during a demonstration in Nantes last year
Michel Barnier will almost certainly lose a motion of no confidence in the French National Assembly
The French President has been in the Middle East this week focusing on the need to ‘bring the Lebanese people together and carry out the reforms necessary for the country’s stability and security’. He probably has a better chance of achieving that in Lebanon than in France.
The country over which Macron now barely presides is in the midst of a perfect storm: a political, economic and financial crisis – the worst since workers rose up to join rioting students during the infamous événements of May 1968, which almost resulted in another French Revolution. It can’t be long before the French take to the streets yet again.
The French economy is stagnant, with growth as elusive as it is in Keir Starmer’s Britain, unemployment rising (it is already 7.4 per cent) and the industrial base shrinking, with famous French names such as Michelin planning closures and lay-offs in the new year.
The French stock market is struggling and foreign investors are shunning a country they only recently regarded as the top European destination for their capital.
Government spending accounts for an incredible 57 per cent of GDP (compared to the UK’s 45 per cent), marking France as more of a socialist than a market economy. The national debt is over 110 per cent of GDP (under 100 per cent in the UK) and rising, with spiralling budget deficits. Spending on welfare, including pensions, is now an unsustainable 25 per cent of GDP.
The more France borrows to spend, the more lenders demand a higher return.
For years, France was able to borrow cheaply by piggy-backing within the Eurozone on Germany’s reputation for fiscal rectitude. Those days are over.
On Monday, the extra interest France has to pay to borrow over ten years versus Germany’s ten-year benchmark bond hit its highest level since 2012. That gap will only widen as the markets realise France is in the grip of a political rigor mortis, which makes deficit cutting or reform impossible.
The flight of capital from France, already under way, can only gather pace. Be in no doubt: as long as the current parliament holds sway, France is unreformable.
When Macron raised retirement age for the state pension from 62 to 64, he ignited major protests for his pains.
Barnier’s spending cuts included delaying an inflation-linked increase for state pensions. This was, naturally, like a red rag to a bull for Mélenchon et al. But, interestingly, it was a red line for Le Pen, too.
What makes reform all but impossible in France these days is the hard Right shares the hard Left’s love of early retirement, costly welfare and widespread state control.
Yet the situation is unsustainable. As France borrows more and more to meet the welfare demands of Left and Right, the cost of servicing its debts soars – from £44 billion this year to a predicted £62 billion in three years.
What happens next is hard to predict – but it’s unlikely to be good. Barnier will stay on as a caretaker until Macron picks a successor.
But whatever hapless politician he chooses will have no more chance of commanding a parliamentary majority than Barnier.
Nor can Macron call fresh elections since, constitutionally, he must wait a year since he last ventured down that rocky road.
If things get really bad, he could invoke Article 16 of the Constitution, which permits a president in times of crisis to govern without the backing of the National Assembly (aka dictatorship).
But Macron’s credibility with the French people is so shot to shreds he has no authority to govern in this manner. Folks would undoubtedly take to the streets in vast numbers.
France is in a febrile mood. Economic sclerosis, rolling lay-offs and lengthening dole queues will make it more so.
Macron could always resign. That is what a majority of the French want him to do – almost 70 per cent in a recent poll – and it would trigger fresh presidential elections. But Macron is unlikely to oblige, especially since, as things stand, Le Pen would be his most likely successor.
So Macron is left to stew in his juices while his country stagnates, his culpability for France’s current predicament increasingly recognised. Last year, one of France’s leading political scientists described Macron as ‘an immature, narcissistic, arrogant child, deaf to others and somewhat incompetent’. That’s now the national consensus.
De Gaulle created the Fifth Republic 66 years ago to turn France into a presidential democracy because the parliamentary government of the Fourth Republic (1946-58) had proved chaotic, with more than 20 governments in 12 years.
Through an act of cavalier stupidity, Macron – who once saw himself as the very essence of presidential rule, even styling himself as Jupiter, that most supreme of Roman gods who sat above the everyday fray – has taken France back to the instability of the Fourth Republic.
When Barnier was appointed PM in September I suggested that he might not last until Christmas. Some thought I was joking.
But I wasn’t: I know my Fourth Republic history.
If his successor takes over early next month, he or she might not last until Easter. France’s crisis will only worsen, under a president who promised a brave new dawn but delivered a dangerous past of decline and despair.
