OPINION: The comic chaos of French politics hides a real danger for democracy

The new National Assembly which meets briefly from Thursday will have 11 groups, three and a half blocs and a score of parties or factions – writes John Lichfield. Some of the splinters are already splintering. One of the blocs, the Left alliance, is on the point of splitting.

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France faces the kind of parliamentary impasse which it has not known since the 1950s: a jigsaw puzzle without pictures. How did we get in this mess?
France has rejected, twice in a month, the centrist policies of President Emmanuel Macron. His decision to call an early parliamentary election to “clarify” the country’s wishes has failed disastrously but has also, bizarrely, succeeded.
You can hear John and the team from The Local France discuss the possible options for government in the latest episode of the Talking France podcast. Download here or listen on the link below

 
The pretensions of Marine Le Pen to lead a serious party of government have been exposed as a farce. For the third time in seven years, France has flirted with the idea of government by the Far Right and turned away (leaving Le Pen nonetheless with a record 143 seats in the new assembly).
What happens now in crunch week for French politics
The Left alliance, with only one third of the seats in parliament, claims a “democratic right” to have a Liz Truss moment and tip the French economy over a cliff. The four left-wing parties are convinced they should rule but, after more than a week of argument, cannot agree on their candidate for Prime Minister.

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The centre-right Les Républicains (LR) with only 60 seats believe they have a De Gaulle-given vocation to lead France – but not yet. Some of their barons – such as Xavier Bertrand, president of the northern French region – want to lead a coalition including Macron’s centre.
Their parliamentary leader Laurent Wauquiez has vetoed LR support for a coalition which, he believes, might wreck his chances of winning the presidential election in 2027. He is ready to enter “legislative pacts” with Macron – a kind of coalition-lite which would prevent party rivals, such as Bertrand, from entering government.
What do the French people want? To go on holiday, if they can afford it, and let the politicians sort out the mess in September.
Only the “militants” of the Left have a clear idea of what should happen next but they have no idea how to get there. They say they have an indisputable right to govern because the left-wing bloc in the new assembly is marginally the largest – 180 seats (up to 192 including independents) compared to 165 seats for Macron’s Ensemble alliance.

They say Macron is “denying the verdict of the ballot box” by refusing to name a left-wing PM. He is lunaire (attached to the moon) or hors-sol (detached from reality). There was even wild talk, now abated, of a march on the National Assembly or strikes during the Olympics if Macron did not give way.
This is a wilful misreading of a constitution which gives the President the right to select the Prime Minister of his choice. He does not have to approach someone from the largest bloc in the assembly unless – according to convention, not the constitution – they have enough seats to form a robust government.
If the divided Left had been more realistic and declared their willingness to lead a coalition including the centre or centre-right, Macron could not easily have refused them. Instead, they made bombastic claims that they could govern alone with 100 seats fewer than a majority and impose their radical programme – a 14 percent increase in the minimum wage, reversing pension reform, ignoring EU rules on deficits.
Explained: The French left alliance’s programme for government
The Left also helped Macron by spending more than a week quarrelling about who would be Prime Minister in a left-wing government of its imagination. The hard-left La France Insoumise (LFI) suggested one of its four chieftains, including its founder-leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The Parti Socialiste insisted on its own leader, Olivier Faure.

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A compromise candidate was suggested by the Communists and accepted by La France Insoumise – Huguette Bello, 73, the ex-Communist president of Réunion, the French island in the Indian Ocean. It immediately became the conviction of LFI social media accounts that Madame Bello, a woman from 9,000 miles away, unknown to 95 percent of French people, should become the Prime Minister of a France in crisis.
Lunaire? Hors-sol? It is evident that parts of the French Left talk only to themselves. The Socialists refused Mme Bello. She withdrew.
On Monday night the Socialists, Communists and Greens split, in effect, with Mélenchon’s LFI by suggesting a more consensual figure who might be able to create a broader coalition. She is Laurence Tubiana, 73, a former climate-change negotiator, a diplomat rather than a party politician.
The Mélenchonistes are expected to refuse. The left alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire, appears to be no longer a Front.

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The likelihood is that there will be no decision on a governing coalition and Prime Minister until the new assembly meets for its first full session on October 1st – and maybe not for weeks after that.
Macron will accept the resignation of Gabriel Attal’s government on either Tuesday or Wednesday to allow ministers to take their seats as deputies and to vote on the assembly president (speaker) and other issues. The voting may provide the first glimpse of embryo coalitions.
Meanwhile, Attal and his ministers will continue to manage “current affairs”. Conveniently, a current affairs government cannot be brought down by a censure motion because it has already resigned. It is unprecedented and constitutionally dubious for a “ghost government” of this kind to continue for two and a half months.
Macron is sailing close to the constitutional wind. He will argue that he has little choice. His hope appears to be that he can eventually enlarge his centrist alliance to the moderate left and to the centre right and emerge almost victorious from two stinging defeats (in the European and national parliament elections).

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This would be a perverse outcome and a dangerous one. However muddled the outcome of the Assembly elections, the clear will of the majority of French voters has been to punish President Macron for failings both real and imagined.
A much healthier solution – and one Macron has hinted that he might consider – is a “parliamentary” government with a compromise domestic programme and a compromise Prime Minister. Macron would enter a kind of “cohabitation”, like presidents Mitterrand and Chirac before him, surrendering control of domestic policy but maintaining his grip on foreign, European and defence policy.
Would Macron swallow that? It is doubtful but possible.
An interesting Ipsos poll in the Tribune Dimanche on Sunday asked voters who they would like to be the next PM. The result was bizarre. After months of screaming for “change”, four in ten of voters questioned said that the new Prime Minister should be the old one, Gabriel Attal.
He topped the poll on 42 percent, with the social-democratic star of the European elections, Raphaël Glucksmann, second on 38 percent.
The result confirms a widespread view that one of the few winners in this election was Attal. He stood up to Macron on his early election call and then campaigned with eloquence, clarity and intelligence. He is evidently a man for the future (and maybe the not too far distant future).
Note also that, if the Nouveau Front Populaire splits, the largest bloc in the new assembly will be Macron’s centre. The Left would be obliged, by their own logic, to acknowledge that a Macron ally should be the first person to attempt to form a government.
That would be the peakest of peak France. But Macron should not make the same mistake as the Left. He should turn to someone from outside his own bloc capable of reaching out to centre-right and centre-left.
It would be dangerous for French democracy if season one of this soap opera ended with Prime Minister Attal giving way to Prime Minister Attal.

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France faces the kind of parliamentary impasse which it has not known since the 1950s: a jigsaw puzzle without pictures. How did we get in this mess?
France has rejected, twice in a month, the centrist policies of President Emmanuel Macron. His decision to call an early parliamentary election to “clarify” the country’s wishes has failed disastrously but has also, bizarrely, succeeded.
You can hear John and the team from The Local France discuss the possible options for government in the latest episode of the Talking France podcast. Download here or listen on the link below

 
The pretensions of Marine Le Pen to lead a serious party of government have been exposed as a farce. For the third time in seven years, France has flirted with the idea of government by the Far Right and turned away (leaving Le Pen nonetheless with a record 143 seats in the new assembly).
What happens now in crunch week for French politics
The Left alliance, with only one third of the seats in parliament, claims a “democratic right” to have a Liz Truss moment and tip the French economy over a cliff. The four left-wing parties are convinced they should rule but, after more than a week of argument, cannot agree on their candidate for Prime Minister.
The centre-right Les Républicains (LR) with only 60 seats believe they have a De Gaulle-given vocation to lead France – but not yet. Some of their barons – such as Xavier Bertrand, president of the northern French region – want to lead a coalition including Macron’s centre.
Their parliamentary leader Laurent Wauquiez has vetoed LR support for a coalition which, he believes, might wreck his chances of winning the presidential election in 2027. He is ready to enter “legislative pacts” with Macron – a kind of coalition-lite which would prevent party rivals, such as Bertrand, from entering government.
What do the French people want? To go on holiday, if they can afford it, and let the politicians sort out the mess in September.
Only the “militants” of the Left have a clear idea of what should happen next but they have no idea how to get there. They say they have an indisputable right to govern because the left-wing bloc in the new assembly is marginally the largest – 180 seats (up to 192 including independents) compared to 165 seats for Macron’s Ensemble alliance.
They say Macron is “denying the verdict of the ballot box” by refusing to name a left-wing PM. He is lunaire (attached to the moon) or hors-sol (detached from reality). There was even wild talk, now abated, of a march on the National Assembly or strikes during the Olympics if Macron did not give way.
This is a wilful misreading of a constitution which gives the President the right to select the Prime Minister of his choice. He does not have to approach someone from the largest bloc in the assembly unless – according to convention, not the constitution – they have enough seats to form a robust government.
If the divided Left had been more realistic and declared their willingness to lead a coalition including the centre or centre-right, Macron could not easily have refused them. Instead, they made bombastic claims that they could govern alone with 100 seats fewer than a majority and impose their radical programme – a 14 percent increase in the minimum wage, reversing pension reform, ignoring EU rules on deficits.
Explained: The French left alliance’s programme for government
The Left also helped Macron by spending more than a week quarrelling about who would be Prime Minister in a left-wing government of its imagination. The hard-left La France Insoumise (LFI) suggested one of its four chieftains, including its founder-leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The Parti Socialiste insisted on its own leader, Olivier Faure.
A compromise candidate was suggested by the Communists and accepted by La France Insoumise – Huguette Bello, 73, the ex-Communist president of Réunion, the French island in the Indian Ocean. It immediately became the conviction of LFI social media accounts that Madame Bello, a woman from 9,000 miles away, unknown to 95 percent of French people, should become the Prime Minister of a France in crisis.
Lunaire? Hors-sol? It is evident that parts of the French Left talk only to themselves. The Socialists refused Mme Bello. She withdrew.
On Monday night the Socialists, Communists and Greens split, in effect, with Mélenchon’s LFI by suggesting a more consensual figure who might be able to create a broader coalition. She is Laurence Tubiana, 73, a former climate-change negotiator, a diplomat rather than a party politician.
The Mélenchonistes are expected to refuse. The left alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire, appears to be no longer a Front.
The likelihood is that there will be no decision on a governing coalition and Prime Minister until the new assembly meets for its first full session on October 1st – and maybe not for weeks after that.
Macron will accept the resignation of Gabriel Attal’s government on either Tuesday or Wednesday to allow ministers to take their seats as deputies and to vote on the assembly president (speaker) and other issues. The voting may provide the first glimpse of embryo coalitions.
Meanwhile, Attal and his ministers will continue to manage “current affairs”. Conveniently, a current affairs government cannot be brought down by a censure motion because it has already resigned. It is unprecedented and constitutionally dubious for a “ghost government” of this kind to continue for two and a half months.
Macron is sailing close to the constitutional wind. He will argue that he has little choice. His hope appears to be that he can eventually enlarge his centrist alliance to the moderate left and to the centre right and emerge almost victorious from two stinging defeats (in the European and national parliament elections).
This would be a perverse outcome and a dangerous one. However muddled the outcome of the Assembly elections, the clear will of the majority of French voters has been to punish President Macron for failings both real and imagined.
A much healthier solution – and one Macron has hinted that he might consider – is a “parliamentary” government with a compromise domestic programme and a compromise Prime Minister. Macron would enter a kind of “cohabitation”, like presidents Mitterrand and Chirac before him, surrendering control of domestic policy but maintaining his grip on foreign, European and defence policy.
Would Macron swallow that? It is doubtful but possible.
An interesting Ipsos poll in the Tribune Dimanche on Sunday asked voters who they would like to be the next PM. The result was bizarre. After months of screaming for “change”, four in ten of voters questioned said that the new Prime Minister should be the old one, Gabriel Attal.
He topped the poll on 42 percent, with the social-democratic star of the European elections, Raphaël Glucksmann, second on 38 percent.
The result confirms a widespread view that one of the few winners in this election was Attal. He stood up to Macron on his early election call and then campaigned with eloquence, clarity and intelligence. He is evidently a man for the future (and maybe the not too far distant future).
Note also that, if the Nouveau Front Populaire splits, the largest bloc in the new assembly will be Macron’s centre. The Left would be obliged, by their own logic, to acknowledge that a Macron ally should be the first person to attempt to form a government.
That would be the peakest of peak France. But Macron should not make the same mistake as the Left. He should turn to someone from outside his own bloc capable of reaching out to centre-right and centre-left.
It would be dangerous for French democracy if season one of this soap opera ended with Prime Minister Attal giving way to Prime Minister Attal.