OPINION: Another week, another attempt to bring down the French government

The world is a dangerous and chaotic place. What should French politicians do about it? Bring down another French government, of course.

The prime minister François Bayrou faces two censure motions in the National Assembly next Monday or Tuesday. He will almost certainly survive – but not for long. His six-months-old government, the fourth French government in the last eighteen months, is likely to fall when it tries to pass a deficit-cutting 2026 budget in September and October.

Early next week, Bayrou faces separate censure motions from the Socialists and from the Greens and harder Left. Which of the many threats to the prosperity of France and the peace of the world have provoked these attacks on a stumbling, minority government?

Ukraine? The middle east? Rising unemployment? A runaway budget deficit?

None of them. The Socialist censure motion is nominally about the modest and inadequate pension reform imposed two years ago. In truth, it is about the Socialists themselves, their internal divisions, their quarrels with the rest of the Left and their inability to decide whether to aspire to become once again a party of government or remain in radical, powerless opposition.

Both motions will fail because Marine Le Pen’s Far Right Rassemblement National has decided to stand aside – for now. Le Pen thinks that is not the right time to bring Bayrou down. She could yet change her mind, as she did last December when she capriciously joined the Left to destroy the government of Michel Barnier.

All the indications are that Le Pen would rather wait until the Autumn before pulling the plug on Bayrou. Does that mean that the Far Right is now more responsible than the Left? Scarcely.

Le Pen is keeping the knife behind her back for personal and party reasons. She may have some slight concern about the impact on public opinion if she pushes France into domestic disarray at a time of multiple, global crises. Mostly, she is still trying to work out how to respond to her five-year ban from seeking electoral office and how to contain the sly ambitions of her Number Two, Jordan Bardella.

The arithmetic is simple. A censure motion needs the votes of 289 of the 577 deputies in the National Assembly to succeed. The minority government has 220 seats. No censure can pass without the 140 votes of Le Pen’s RN and her allies.

So why are the 66 Socialist deputies bringing a doomed censure motion despite their agreement last February to a passive alliance with Bayrou which allowed the 2025 state budget to pass?

I wrote last week that there was a chance that the sea serpent of pension reform could be removed from the French political conversation for a few years. I was over-optimistic.

Part of Bayrou’s deal with the Socialists in February was a “conclave” between employers and unions to “improve” President Emmanuel Macron’s 2023 pension reform which increased the state retirement age from 62 to 64. There was little hope at the time that these negotiations could succeed. The more radical trades union federations walked out immediately.

In fact, other unions and the employers made more progress than expected. To the fury of some Socialists, the three moderate union federations accepted the increased retirement age. In return they demanded that pension rights should be improved for women with families and that people in arduous jobs should be allowed early retirement.

On Monday, a last round of talks came close to a deal but the employers refused to consider any increase in their contributions to balance their books. The Prime Minister is still trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again as I write. He may put forward a draft law, to be debated in the Autumn, which would codify the advances made in the talks.

No matter. The Socialists have decided not to wait and see. They are furious - or pretending to be furious – that the “conclave” did not recommend a reduction in the pension age to 62 or at least 63.

This was never likely to happen. The Socialist leadership insisted that that it must – to justify their decision to split with the rest of the Left and allow Bayrou’s 2025 budget to pass in February.

The issue has come to symbolise the party’s debate on its own future. Will it remain allied to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s tear-it-all-down La France Insoumise (LFI)? Or will the Socialists become once again a would-be reformist party-of-government?

The narrow re-election as party leader this month of Olivier Faure, the man who entered the alliance with Mélenchon’s LFI, has left the Socialists deeply divided and with no obvious strategy. The party might have entered the real world by praising the genuine pension advances made by the moderate union federations. Instead, it reverted to an obsession with a pension age of 62 - which will allow some form of new electoral alliance with the Greens and harder Left to be cobbled together.

In sum, next week’s censure motions are mostly about sterile manoeuvring on the Left but they will further weaken an already fragile, minority coalition government. Bayrou’s greatest achievement as PM was to split the Left and bring the Socialists into a kind of uneasy association with the Centre and the Centre-Right. He has now “lost” the Socialists again, as it was perhaps inevitable that he would.

Like Michel Barnier before him, Bayrou will therefore become a prisoner of the selfish and electoral calculations of Marine Le Pen and the Far Right. A successful censure motion seems just a matter of time.

What will Emmauel Macron do then? Appoint another fragile Prime Minister? Or call a new election, which would be unlikely to change much in the splintered Assembly?

He has no good choices but I fear we may be heading for an October or November election.