D’accord. This is not quite the French Revolution. We are not yet back to chopping off heads. Michel Barnier will go back into retirement after he is toppled on Wednesday. He won’t go to the guillotine.
But this was supposed to be a week of national celebration and renewal. On Saturday Notre Dame cathedral will reopen five years after it was almost destroyed by fire. Its spectacular rebirth, on time and on budget, is a tribute to French unity, talent and willpower.
And yet Wednesday will see a manifestation of French pig-headedness, parochialism and perversity. A censure vote in the National Assembly will plunge the country into a second government crisis of the year. The Left and Far Right, who agree on nothing, will agree to topple Barnier and kill the 2025 budget.
At a time of multiple international dangers, France will be deprived of a government. At a time when French state finances are teetering on the edge of the abyss, France will be deprived of a budget which was meant, clumsily maybe, to bring commonsense into the national accounts.
The Left, in its present guise, is acting logically. It is has become a force for destruction, rather than renewal.
It is Marine Le Pen who will cast the swing votes which make Barnier both the oldest and shortest-lived PM of the Fifth Republic. She claims that she is acting to defend the purchasing power of the not-so-well off.
Piffle.
She says that she is ready to vote for a rollover of the 2024 budget to keep the government from shutting down. But that will bring 380,000 poor families into the income tax net for the first time. The failure to adjust tax bands to inflation will mean that another 3,000,000 people will pay higher taxes.
France’s borrowing costs on world markets are already soaring. The absence of a proper 2025 budget – likely to last for at least three months and maybe much longer – will prevent increases in defence spending to counter the threat from Russia. It will block action, inter alia, to ease the shortage of doctors in some rural areas.
Merci Marine.
Her real motives are obscure. She had seemed to be ready to show that she is capable of making the hard choices demanded of government. She has reverted in the last three weeks to populist rhetoric.
The change can be traced almost exactly to the moment when she grasped that she faced a high chance of being banned from the 2027 presidential election. She denies any connection; Barnier is convinced, according to sources in his office, that she would not be planning to remove him if her embezzlement trial had happened next year or not at all.
Some politicians and commentators believe that Le Pen is trying, Trump-like, to rescue her political career. The removal of Barnier will, she hopes, lead to the removal of President Emmanuel Macron.
If Macron resigns (highly unlikely), there would have to be a presidential election within 30 days – in other words in January. Judgement in her corruption trial is not expected before March 31st.
If she was by then the President of the Republic (not out of the question) the three judges would, she hopes, face an impossible choice. Could they really ban from electoral office the serving head of state?
In the coming days, there will be a growing clamour, on both Left and Far Right, for Macron’s resignation "to clear the political logjam". That is one reason why Macron will NOT shilly-shally for two months before he appoints a new PM, as he did in the summer.
By taking decisive action to replace Barnier, he will hope to appear as a force for stability, not a cause of the chaos. Word is that he will announce a new name by the end of the week. The name most cited is his friend and close ally, the defence minister Sébastien Lecornu – who is tolerated by both the Left and the Far Right.
But there is another reason why Macron wants to act rapidly.
A 'special' law to rollover 2024 taxes and spending has to be agreed by the end of the month or, in theory, government could shut down. Both Far Right and Left have said they will not block such a law. But there has, ideally, to be a proper government in place to frame and propose the bill.
According to some constitutional experts, a caretaker Barnier government could do so. According to others, it could not - without risking a challenge in the Constitutional Council.
Such law would only be a stopgap. The coming political months will be miserably confused at a time when Europe and the world needs a strong French voice.
The National Assembly is irretrievably split into three and a half mutually-hating blocs. There can be no new parliamentary elections until July.
It is difficult to see why Lecornu, or any other PM, could succeed where Barnier, the Brexit-negotiator, failed. Persuading the Europeans and the British to make a deal was, it turns out, much easier than persuading the French to agree with the French.
The “spring of hope” will come early with the reopening of Notre Dame on Saturday. “The winter of despair” will be long and hard.
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