French government collapses, again, deepening paralysis

By Roger Cohen

PARIS — The government of François Bayrou, a centrist prime minister who has been in office for just nine months, collapsed Monday (8) in the latest sign of a France reduced to chronic political instability and an incapacity to confront its growing financial crisis.

The National Assembly, or Lower House of Parliament, voted overwhelmingly against Bayrou in a confidence motion he had called with the aim of setting out the gravity of France’s ballooning debt and budget deficit, and the need to confront them by finding annual savings of at least $51 billion.

The vote was 364 against Bayrou’s government and 194 in favour in the 577-seat lower house, a crushing defeat for the prime minister. Abstentions and absences accounted for the remaining lawmakers.

This was a demise foretold. Fatalistic in the face of a parliamentary impasse, Bayrou had, even before the debate began, invited his entourage to a ‘convivial moment’, or farewell soiree, Monday evening. With four prime ministers in the past 20 months, and a fifth likely to be appointed now, the fall of French governments, once unusual, has become close to mundane.

“All the challenges facing us come down to one essential, urgent question, the one on which our future, our state, our independence, our public services and social model depend — that is the question of controlling our spending and our excessive debt,” Bayrou declared to a packed lower house.

“Domination by military force, or domination by our creditors as a result of debts that drown us, produces the same result: The loss of our liberty,” Bayrou said, to opposition cries of “It’s not the same thing!”

His appeal fell on deaf ears. The far right of Marine Le Pen and a group of left and far-left parties, holding a clear majority between them, rejected the freezing of welfare payments, cutting two national holidays and other austerity measures proposed by Bayrou. Le Pen, true to her National Rally party’s doctrine, suggested cutting spending on immigrants instead.

“The question posed now is that of the survival of our political system,” Alain Duhamel, a prominent author and political scientist, told the daily Le Monde. He compared the current situation to the parliamentary paralysis of 1958 that led to Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s creation of the Fifth Republic, adding: “But in 1958 there was an alternative in the form of De Gaulle. Like him or detest him, he unquestionably had a project”.

Certainly, the fall of Bayrou thrust France into a political void bereft of plausible answers. It placed renewed pressure on President Emmanuel Macron, who has become an isolated figure even as he attempts to play a central international rule in ending the wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip. This effort has taken up much of his time.

Macron, who is term limited and obliged to give up the presidency in about 18 months, is not a lame duck but he is far from the irresistible young change agent of his first election in 2017. He has been less forthright than his outgoing prime minister on the gathering economic storm and must now either pick a new prime minister or call parliamentary elections.

Neither is an attractive prospect for the embattled president, whose support has fallen to 15%, according to an opinion poll this month for Le Figaro Magazine by the Verian Group.

The choice of another prime minister from his own centrist group would resemble applying a temporary and partial bandage to a deep wound. A prime minister from the moderate Socialist Party would probably have insufficient parliamentary support. Another election, 14 months after the last one that resulted in the current paralysis, would, according to several opinion polls, see Le Pen’s National Rally cement a clear lead.

Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement by a criminal court in Paris earlier this year and barred from running for public office for five years. After Bayrou spoke, she told the National Assembly that the dissolution of parliament leading to a new election was “an obligation” for Macron, if he respected French democracy.

“What we have witnessed today is the end of the agony of a phantom government,” she said, her tone triumphant.

In a speech this past weekend, Le Pen suggested that her “pugnacious” young protege, Jordan Bardella, who is one of the most popular politicians in France, was ready to become prime minister.

A Paris Appeals Court announced Monday that Le Pen’s appeal against her ban would be heard between Jan. 13 and Feb. 11. The verdict would likely come some months after that, about a year before the presidential election. Despite her uncertain status, Le Pen continues to hold large sections of French society in her thrall, an indication of widespread and growing exasperation with the status quo.

With the National Assembly divided into far-right, centrist and left-wing blocs, each large enough to create an impasse, France has been in a state of ominous drift since Macron called snap parliamentary elections in June 2024, a gesture as apparently capricious as Bayrou’s and one that upended French politics.

France has become nearly ungovernable because the old alternation between moderate left and right has been replaced by the growing dominance of political extremes in a country with no tradition of compromise and coalition building of the kind found in Italy or Germany. A tripartite balance of power – far left, centre and far right – has become a byword for inertia, as Bayrou, short on initiative and slow to negotiate, seemed to adopt a policy of drift.

Some of the political showdown Monday echoed turmoil from last year, when Michel Barnier, Bayrou’s predecessor, fell to a no-confidence vote in December, raising fears that France would fail to pass a budget for 2025 and enter uncharted financial territory.

Bayrou was, belatedly, able to secure the passage of a budget in February after he negotiated with the Socialist Party, which wrested whatever concessions it could. He also benefited from the wary benevolence of the National Rally, which did not then see any immediate benefit in prolonging governmental instability by toppling him.

At the time, both parties had argued that a bad budget was better than no budget at all. That appears to have changed.

The French budget deficit is now nearly $198 billion, or 5.8% of economic output, well above the 3% limit set by the European Union for countries using the euro currency. In his speech, Bayrou said his aim was to reduce the deficit to 3% by 2029. The national debt is now equal to 114% of total economic output.

The core of the economic issue is one of national identity. In France, the social safety net, which includes education, health care and pensions, is the near sacred expression of the French Revolution’s call for a “fraternal” society.

Any attempt to curtail social benefits is near anathema, as was made clear by an intense conflict in 2023 over Macron’s decision to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62, and by the furious response to Bayrou’s proposal to eliminate two public holidays to increase production and raise tax revenue.

Macron’s “whatever it takes” response to the COVID-19 crisis, in which salaries were effectively nationalized in many cases, also added to the current grave imbalance.

Any future leader of whatever stripe will face the dilemma of demanding changes that France has staunchly resisted, unlike European countries from Scandinavia to Germany that have curtailed their welfare states.

Bayrou clearly chose to fall as a martyr whose last act was to issue a dire warning. “I wanted this moment of truth,” he said.

“The problem, the threat and the risk for France will remain undiminished, because you, honourable lawmakers, have the power to overturn the government but not the power to overturn reality.”

-New York Times