What does France's right turn mean for the EU?
President Macron has appointed a right-wing prime minister despite the left-wing alliance's election victory in July. It will mean a political pivot to the right, and an enraged left in France.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s surprise decision yesterday to appoint the center-right former EU Commissioner and Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier as prime minister has infuriated the French left, which came first in July’s election but did not win enough seats to form a government. For the past two months, the left has been insisting that unless Macron appoints a prime minister from the left, he is not respecting the election result. But after a summer of negotiations, Macron has decided that his best bet in forming a lasting majority in the parliament is pushing for a centrist coalition with the tacit support of the far right. In France, the appointment of prime minister is the exclusive decision of the president to make - but that person must be able to survive a majority confidence vote by MPs.
Though he was strangely portrayed as some kind of radical EU federalist in the British media during the Brexit years, Barnier is in fact a very conservative Gaulist with strong nationalist inclinations. He has twice been a commissioner in Brussels and four times been a minister in the French government, one of the leaders of the center-right party of Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac. When I’ve interviewed him in the past, he has shown himself to be a man who believes it is in Europeans’ interests to have a strong EU that does not show weakness or bend the rules for anyone. His past comments have shown he views the EU as an essential vehicle to make France relevant and powerful in the world. But at the same time his chief allegiance has always been to Paris (even, some would argue, while he was an EU commissioner).
Barnier now has two big tasks ahead of him: he needs to keep the parliament together over the next month in time for the 1 October deadline to present a budget bill. To do that, he’ll need to avoid any successful vote of no confidence. Unsurprisingly, far right leader Marine Le Pen very quickly said yesterday that she’s open to supporting Barnier. That will mean it’s up to the left to try to reject him by triggering a vote of no confidence, but it doesn’t look like they have the votes for that.
The stark reality is that in this situation, Le Pen is a kingmaker. At any moment, if she decides to join with the left in a no-confidence vote, she can bring Barnier down. Together Macron’s centrists and Barnier’s center-right Les Republicains have only 213 seats, far short of the 289 needed for a majority. Le Pen’s National Rally have said that in order to give Barnier their support, they want guarantees on security and immigration, purchasing power, and the introduction of proportional representation in parliament. Even if they are given these assurances, it still gives the National Rally the power to block key parts of Macron’s second-term agenda over the coming two years. Worryingly for Brussels, this includes the budget cuts that have been deemed necessary by the European Commission, which opened an an excessive deficit procedure against France earlier this year (the deadline for addressing those concerns is just weeks away). So, in the end, despite voters firm rejection of the far right in July election (putting them in a surprise third place) Le Pen has snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. And, if Barnier remains as prime minister, she will have the power to force the government to tell the EU to get lost in the coming months over the excessive deficit procedure.
Le Pen isn’t the only worry for Brussels. While to outsiders it might seem that Barnier is the ultimate EU insider, the reality is his Gaulism has made him a frequent critic of the European project. On this subject, he is nothing like Macron. During his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2022, he frequently railed against the EU on the campaign trail and called for a referendum on immigration that could violate EU law. He also called for France to “no longer be subject to the judgments” of the European Court of Justice, the EU’s supreme court. Though he has since walked that back.
“I know that Michel Barnier has the interests of Europe and of France at heart,” President von der Leyen, whose re-appointment as Commission President Barnier opposed, said in reaction to the news yesterday. Others are not so sure. The new reality in France, with an anti-federalist center-right prime minister dependent on an anti-EU far-right party leader in order to keep his job, does not seem to be good news for Brussels. But anything could happen in the next weeks, including a successful no-confidence vote that would turf Barnier out. It’s possible that this is a power move by Macron to show he is serious about not accepting any majority that includes the far left, in order to make the left-wing alliance more amenable to breaking apart and supporting a prime minister from Macron’s centrists. It’s going to be an interesting few weeks in French politics.