The new government in France is already besieged as leaders of far-left parties are refusing to meet with Prime Minister Michel Barnier and the leftist New Popular Front coalition is vowing to “do everything” to take down the government.
Less than one week after being installed in the Hôtel Matignon by President Macron, Prime Minister Barnier, a centre-right member of the establishment Les Republicans party and former Eurocrat Brexit negotiator, is already facing attempts to remove him from office.
“We will do everything to try to bring down this government,” vowed Benjamin Lucas, a lawmaker from the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) alliance comprised of communist, socialist, social democrat, and green parties.
The National Assembly member added according to Le Figaro: “Once this government has fallen, the President of the Republic will rally around the institutional logic, which wants him to entrust [power] to the only existing relative majority… the NFP.”
Meanwhile, despite Barnier’s vow to appoint leftist politicians to his cabinet, the top two leaders of the Socialist Party, First Secretary Olivier Faure and the party’s president in the National Assembly Boris Vallaud, have reportedly refused to even meet with the new prime minister. However, Barnier scheduled a meeting with the head of the French Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, who said he will go into the meeting “with no illusions”.
On Thursday, Barnier was still forming his government and promised a “balanced and plural” selection of ministers where “everyone will have their place”, it is reported. The left continue to voice their anger at developments, with a representative of the Communists calling Macron “the greatest of thieves” and “no gentleman” for snubbing them for the Prime Minister’s office, saying it is a denial of democracy.
It comes as over 100,000 leftists protested in Paris over the weekend in response to Barnier’s installation, which they described as a “coup” by Macron against the New Popular Front. Despite garnering millions fewer votes than the populist National Rally of Marine Le Pen, the NFP was able to win the most seats in the snap elections in July as a result of a strategic voting alliance with Macron, who sided with the far-left to prevent the populist party from taking power.
At the protest in Paris on Sunday, former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon vowed that his far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party — the main force within the New Popular Front — would launch a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly to oust the Barnier government.
However, despite claiming the mantle of democratic legitimacy, the New Popular Front does not have enough votes to take down the government by itself, with the coalition only boasting 180 seats in the National Assembly, far below the necessary 289 needed to win the motion. As the Republicains and the neo-liberal Macronist factions in the parliament are likely to stand behind Barnier, this would mean that the NFP would need to have the support of Le Pen and her ranks to successfully overthrow the government.
Yet, as Le Monde notes, during the first two years of Macron’s second term in office, 17 motions of no confidence all failed as a result of the far-left and populist right refusing to agree to come together. Further back, only one time in the history of the Fifth Republic has a vote of no confidence successfully taken down a government, that which forced out then-Prime Minister Georges Pompidou in October of 1962.
Therefore, the move to launch a no-confidence vote may be less about actually removing the government than it is about the far-left tethering Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) politically with Barnier, who faces multiple crises, including spirally government debt, mass migration, and rising Islamist terrorism within the country.
While RN president Jordan Bardella has taken credit for successfully blocking Macron from appointing a far-left prime minister, the party has been intent on demonstrating distance from Barnier, saying that the new PM is a leader “under surveillance” and that to gain support from the Le Pen wing, the new government must adopt some populist measures, most likely on areas such as immigration.
Given Barnier’s history of supporting restrictions on migration, Macron’s government may be willing to make such a deal to protect what the ex-Rothschild banker sees as his chief accomplishment in office to date, raising the pension age.