What is next for France after no-confidence vote on Macron's PM?

France, the second largest economy in Europe, is under a political duress as the country’s centre-to-right government was rejected by a no-confidence vote on Wednesday, forcing Prime Minister Michel Barnier to resign.

French politics found itself in chaos soon after European Parliament elections in June, in which the French far-right block led by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally made big gains against President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist allies.

The latest victim of the French turbulence became the country’s elderly figure Michel Barnier, the prime minister handpicked by Macron. Barnier could not persuade lawmakers to vote for his government’s budget despite behind-the-scenes political maneuvering with the far-right, which did not find his concessions sufficient.

“The small steps he timidly and belatedly attempted cannot be called concessions, they are crumbs,” said Le Pen, criticising Barnier’s budget, which does not protect “the most vulnerable” considering them “too rich to be helped but not poor enough to escape the tax bludgeoning.”

Both Le Pen’s block and the leftist alliance voted against Barnier’s budget, inflicting a deadly blow to Macron’s business-friendly centrist politics as both sides called for his resignation from the presidency. But the president refused to stand down during his address yesterday.

In the summer, Macron called the snap election after seeing that his centrist coalition was in a total disarray in the face of a rising far-right, but the July poll did not favour him – as the leftist alliance coalesced into a largest bloc in a hung parliament.

But Macron, who projects his brand of politics as a barrier to the far-right, refused to work with the leftist alliance, choosing Barnier, a conservative politician from Les Republicains (The Republicans), as his prime minister instead. Barnier hoped to form a temporary alliance with Le Pen.

Macron did not meet the leftist alliance, portraying it as a threat to the country’s “institutional stability". He argued that the leftist alliance should be “censored” by centrists and right-wing parties including the National Rally, while meeting Le Pen to discuss her participation in a conservative-led government.

Stabbed in the back

“They made a huge political mistake, by betting on the Rassemblement National (National Rally) and that instead they should have been courting the left rather than the Rassemblement National,” says Francois Gemenne, a political scientist at Sciences Po in Paris and the University of Liege in Belgium, referring to Macron’s unsuccessful gambit with Le Pen.

Barnier’s appointment purely came on the heels of Macron’s survival tactics despite the former representing one of the smallest parties with only 39 deputies out of 577 seats of the National Assembly in Paris.

Even the leader of Les Republicains, Eric Ciotti, joined the far-right Rassemblement National-led bloc prior to the election.

Gemenne says that by appointing Barnier as the prime minister and Bruno Retailleau as the interior minister, “who is very close to the Rassemblement National”, Macron and his allies “have been courting the extreme right from the beginning.”

“Everything they did from the start since Michel Barnier took office was to try to please the Rassemblement National in the hope of being able to count on them at the moment of crucial votes like this,” says the professor.

But the no-confidence vote showed that “the Rassemblement National stabbed them in the back,” Gemenne tells TRT World, showing how Macron got it “completely wrong in terms of political, strategic and political maneuvering.”

The leftist alliance celebrated the no-confidence vote backed by the far-right as the bloc’s leading France Unbowed party leader Jean-Luc Melenchon called to “find a way out” from the elite-centric system, urging France to “form the Sixth Republic.”

Mathilde Panot, a France Unbowed lawmaker, described the vote as “a powerful signal for the whole country,” which shows “the only sovereign in a republic and a democracy is the people,”

What is next?

The collapse of the Barnier government is a phenomenal development for French politics due to the fact that no government has received a no-confidence vote since 1962. The French vote came after the German government collapsed last month. Both states face emboldened far-right challenges and are under the economic pressure of the Ukraine war.

Another snap election until July is out of Macron’s reach from a constitutional angle. He needs to find another prime minister, who can be acceptable to the majority of the country’s divided National Assembly. During his speech last night, he vowed to name another prime minister within days.

Gemenne believes that the prime minister will “be replaced with a kind of copycat of Barnier”, who will possibly be from the Les Republicains or a close ally of Macron in the coming days.

“People are speculating that the new prime minister might be appointed today because they want to avoid any kind of political void,” he says.

Macron might also try to appoint a prime minister to rally the Greens and the Socialist Party on his side, but to realise this scenario Macron needs to make necessary alignment with those leftists, which is a big question mark, according to Gemenne.

“The French president should be faster than before because of political instability with many consequences and ramifications beyond politics (sovereign debts, economics) without forgetting the European and international scene,” says Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, a French professor of history-geography and a researcher in geopolitics in the Thomas More Institute.

Mongrenier believes that possible Macron candidates to replace Barnier might be Francois Bayrou, the leader of the centrist party MoDem, or Bernard Cazeneuve, an independent and moderate socialist.

But he foresees a set of hurdles ahead of Macron in overcoming the “'alliance of contraries' between La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), its socialist and ecologist partners, and the Rassemblement National,” referring to the collaboration between the leftist alliance and the far-right party to sack Barnier.

“It looks like a political stalemate, even a regime crisis. If ‘the alliance of contraries’ should push Macron further, it would mean, at last in spirit, the end of the Fifth Republic, which has been founded on the principle and the basis of a strong executive power at the hands of the presidency,” Mongrenier tells TRT World.

The Fifth Republic emerged in 1958 under France’s legendary leader Charles de Gaulle, who envisioned to empower the executive branch of the state creating a semi-presidential system to prevent government crises, which had undermined the French system since the 1789 Revolution.

The recent no-confidence vote signals that “the executive power would be under the domination of the deputies” heralding possible upcoming government crises as happened often in the Third Republic era, during which President Patrice de MacMahon was dismissed in 1879, according to Mongrenier.

“The question is: will Macron match this challenge?” as de Gaulle was able to do in the past, says the French academic. “Will he be able to rise to the situation and behave as a great head of state?”

French finances in trouble

Gemenne also draws attention to the fact that by changing the guard in the prime ministry post will not change the dire reality of political and economic problems France faces as the country’s growing budget deficits and increasing public debt continue to get worse.

Some economists see similar patterns between the current French debt crisis and the Greek crash in the late 2000s, which had continued for almost a decade, plunging the Balkan state into an economic turmoil.

Macron’s state debt is now nearly 111 percent of the country’s GDP, which is “a level unmatched since World War II”, according to CNN. The debt crisis has its roots in public spending due to Covid 19 and energy costs triggered by the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

“French stocks have fallen sharply in recent weeks, and the premium investors demand to hold the government’s long-term debt has risen to its highest level since the eurozone debt crisis of 2012,” according to a Wall Street Journal report.

For Gemenne, Wednesday's no-confidence vote shows a real lack of confidence of French people in their government.

“I feel that people are really fed up with what they perceive as a little strategic game with their money in the future. A lot of people are really disgusted,” he says.