Paris feels like being engulfed by a whirlwind these days. The staccato-speaking TV anchors are even more nervous than usual. The rhetorical violence in France’s rarely neighborly political discourse is reaching new heights. The government and the opposition are accusing each other in the worst possible terms. Farmer unions are threatening to visit the homes of MPs who opted to vote Prime Minister Michel Barnier out of office over his proposed budget this week. The proposed budget law would have included some props for them.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), has been calling for President Emmanuel Macron to step down. For some weeks now, far-right leader Marine Le Pen has also suggested that France would be better off if Macron were to bow out. The henchmen of the Rassemblement National’s (RN) perpetual presidential candidate are going on TV arguing that Macron’s departure is the only possible solution to the current political crisis.
Le Pen is in a hurry. By March 31, 2025, a Paris court could convict her of embezzling EU funds and ban her from running in elections for up to five years. So, things have to move fast if the 56-year-old wants to make sure she has another shot at the Élysée.
A Chaos Strategy
Mélenchon’s and Le Pen’s strategy? To produce chaos, it seems. “The events will push Macron to go,” the far-left firebrand predicted yesterday.
The political logjam may lead to budget cuts; a financial crunch combined with an economic downturn would then trigger large-scale protests and strikes. With the constitution stipulating that parliamentary elections cannot take place before July 2025, Macron may have no other choice than to resign to break the deadlock.
Snap elections would have to take place 20 to 35 days after the president’s departure. In that short timeframe, the Macronist centerist parties and the center-right Les Républicains (LR) would find it impossible to agree on a joint candidate. With the centrist vote split, Mélenchon and Le Pen could finally fight it out between themselves in the second round. Voilà, the screenplay.
But do the two engineers of chaos have a shot? Can they succeed with the old nihilist strategy of bringing about catastrophe so their utopia may (perhaps) rise from the ashes? The short answer is no.
Anxiety Attack
First, the political crisis sparked by Barnier’s ousting is unlikely to throw France into real financial and economic distress in the short term.
True, borrowing costs Paris must pay on new debt briefly surpassed the ones Athens has to disburse. The spread between the interest France and Germany must pay has risen to levels last seen in 2012—at the height of the European sovereign debt crisis.
Yet, a sober look at financial markets is calming. In fact, yields on French sovereign bonds have fallen since April this year. This means that it is getting cheaper for Paris to take on new debt.
In April, no one expected Macron to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale after suffering a brutal defeat in the June 9 European Parliament elections. In April, no one imagined that by the end of the year, France would find itself without a government and a 2025 budget law. Yet at the time, investors charged the French state a higher interest rate than today.
How come? If the European Central Bank in Frankfurt and even more importantly the Federal Reserve in Washington cut interest rates, as they have done in recent months, yields on sovereign bonds fall.
Even in tumultuous 2024, politics was secondary to monetary policy in determining France’s refinancing costs. It’s a lesson in humility for politicians and a testimony of the still US-centered world order that whether France gets into real financial trouble depends more on the decisions of Federal Reserve Governor Jerome Powell than on Marine Le Pen.
France today is thus not like the United Kingdom in October 2022, when then Prime Minster Liz Truss had to step down, outlasted by a lettuce, after presenting a blown-out budget while central banks tightened monetary policy. Moreover, French sovereign bonds have an average debt maturity of eight years. Higher borrowing costs thus take a long time to sink in. And with Germany taking on next to no new debt, investors don’t have much of a choice other than to buy French sovereign bonds if they are looking to park their money in a large and liquid euro-denominated bond market.
That’s not ignoring the fact that France’s public finances are on a dangerous path. But we have not yet reached the end of the road. The country’s current crisis is primarily political, not financial or economic. (Macron knows this, and that is why, unlike Barnier, he never thought reducing the budget deficit was the overriding political priority.)
The Long Road to Compromise Politics
The writer Michel Houellebecq once said, “France has a talent for depression.” Pessimism has been en voguein the country of Candide seemingly forever. But it now seems that France is also developing a liking for anxiety attacks. Stress due to a sense of “loss of control” is one of the most frequent causes of anxiety, doctors say.
For the French, the July parliamentary elections that delivered a hung parliament for the second time in a row certainly feel like such a loss of control. Always used to having one party in charge of the parliament, no one and everyone is now calling the shots. France is still a hierarchically organized, and highly individualistic, society, where in school one is taught to strive above all to finish best in class rather than collaborate with fellow students. For the French, the absence of clear leadership is unsettling.
France’s political elite has never learned to do politics like most Europeans do it—by fighting over voter shares first, but then sharing power and forging compromises second. The path to a more parliamentary democracy is thus rocky and chaotic. It is also long.
Even if new parliamentary elections in the summer of 2025 produce a hung parliament for the third time in a row, the republic’s political class might once again refuse to form a stable coalition government. With all eyes on the presidential elections scheduled for spring 2027, they fear that governing and compromising risks alienating voters.
The Center Still Holds
So, what will the next few years of French politics look like?
Most likely Macron is going to appoint a centrist politician such as François Bayrou or a technocrat such as Central Bank Governor François Villeroy de Galhau as prime minister.
This person would be backed by Macron’s allies in the Assemblée, but also by the center-left Parti Socialiste (PS) and the Républicains. That would not be a formal coalition, but they would have to agree at least to not vote out the prime minister.
These three centrist factions have a majority in parliament, and importantly they have no interest in snap presidential elections. All of them want a government in place that can at least take the most urgent measures to ensure that a roll-over of the 2024 budget doesn’t lead to cuts that could spark “yellow vest”-type protests.
Such a stopgap government would hold until new parliamentary elections in summer 2025. French domestic politics remaining on stand-by for six months is not ideal, but it is not an existential problem for France—or Europe for that matter. The question is rather where this ultimately leaves us in 2027 and beyond.
It’s possible that by then France’s political elite will have realized that the “my way, or no way” politics of the past has no future anymore in a country whose electorate is fragmenting and splintering like everywhere else in Europe. Politics based on negotiations and compromise could pacify the hyper-nervous French political scene.
But it’s also possible that this will not happen. Italy’s history warns us that technocratic and stopgap governments usually strengthen populists at the voting booth.
What seems likely, however, is that the French drama will not be a one-season series. Macron will not leave the scene anytime soon. He still has 30 months as France’s president, Macron said yesterday in a nationally televised address. The Netflix drama of French politics will occupy us for the coming years, and the climatic high point might only come in 2027.
Joseph de Weck is INTERNATIONALE POLITIK QUARTERLY’s Paris columnist and author of Emmanuel Macron. The revolutionary president.
