A poor decision by Macron to call a snap election has made France ungovernable. Macron ponders a socialist technocrat (non-politician) to head up French domestic policy.
Le Monde reports Macron Considers New Name in Prime Minister Search.
As President Emmanuel Macron began a new round of consultations to find a new prime minister on the morning of Monday, September 2, meeting with former Socialist prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve and President of the Hauts-de-France region Xavier Bertrand, several sources mentioned the possibility of him appointing Thierry Beaudet, president of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE).
Beaudet, former president of a federation of non-profit health insurance companies and with experience working alongside business leaders and labor unions, chairs the consultative body that hosted the two citizens’ conventions (on climate and assisted dying) initiated by the French president. Trained as a primary school teacher and close to the left, he took a stand in June in La Tribune against the far-right Rassemblement National.
Le Monde has learned that the Elysée Palace has already found a chief of staff for the next prime minister: Bertrand Gaume, 49, prefect of the Nord department. Gaume, a senior civil servant with a meteoric career, has also worked for the French General Directorate for External Services (DGSE).
Macron has located a chief of staff for the next prime minister, but not the prime minister. What the heck?
Rassemblement National is Marine Le Pen’s party.
How Did We Get Here?
June 30: President Macron’s Party Blown Out in First Round of French Parliament Elections
In response to a wipeout in European Parliament elections, Macron called snap elections for parliament, not the office of president.
July 7: France is Now Ungovernable Following a Pyrrhic Victory for the Left-Green Alliance
What Happened?
The short answer is the center and left colluded to stop the right, as normally happens.
The long answer is France has a two-stage election where any party that gets 12.5 percent of the vote makes it to round two unless someone wins an outright majority in round one.
As typical in France, all but the lead or second place party drop out of the election so the Right faces a single opposition candidate.
As a result, the Left and Center kept Rassemblement National out of power.
Pyrrhic Victory
In 2022, Macron’s Ensemble governing coalition had 250 seats. MPs: 172 Renaissance, 48 MoDem and independents and 30 Horizons and those affiliated.
The coalition now has just 166 members.
Macron’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal resigned on July 7 and Macron accepted the resignation on July 16. Attal has been in a caretaker role with ever since.
France 24 Take
The far Left is upset over the process as reported by France 24.
France has been without a permanent government since the July 7 polls, in which the left formed the largest faction in a hung parliament with Macron’s centrists and the far right comprising the other major groups.
Two possible candidates for prime minister – former premier Bernard Cazeneuve from the centre left and right-wing ex-minister Xavier Bertrand – held separate meetings with Macron.
French daily Le Monde reported that 62-year-old Thierry Beaudet, head of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE) advisory body and a figure utterly unknown to most French people, was also considered for the job.
“It’s a very serious option,” a person close to Macron said. “It’s a solid, new response to the need for dialogue in society.”
To the fury of the left, Macron has refused to accept the nomination of a left-wing premier, arguing such a figure would have no chance of surviving a confidence motion in parliament.
Amid the political deadlock Macron, who has less than three years of his term remaining, has run down the clock as the Olympics and Paralympics took place in Paris, to the growing frustration of opponents.
But amid signs of an acceleration as France returns from holidays, Macron early Monday hosted Cazeneuve, a former leading Socialist who headed the government in the final months of Hollande’s 2012-17 presidential term.
Macron also held talks with Xavier Bertrand, the right-wing head of the northern Hauts-de-France region and a former minister.
Bertrand, 59, would be a much more palatable figure for the right as premier.
Sarkozy remains an influential figure on the right – despite a string of graft convictions after leaving office on charges he denies – and even within Macron’s circle, has already made his preference clear.
“The centre of gravity of French politics is on the right”, he argued in the Figaro daily on Saturday.
He said Bertrand would be a “good choice”, while opposing Cazeneuve’s nomination.
“Appointing Bernard Cazeneuve to the office of prime minister would implicitly acknowledge the fact that the ‘new world’ has failed,” Le Monde wrote in an editorial.
France’s left-wing New Popular Front alliance had demanded that the president pick their candidate Lucie Castets, a 37-year-old economist and civil servant with a history of left-wing activism.
France has a budget mess that the next prime minister will inherit.
Debt Proceedings
Please note the EU Rebukes France, Italy and Others Over Excessive Debt.
The assessments of the 27 EU states’ budgets and economies will be published by the European Commission on Wednesday, with France, Italy and Belgium among the member states to be reprimanded over their accumulated excessive new debt.
The EU suspended debt and deficit regulations to help countries cope with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The rules are now back in place and now any EU country going over debt and deficit limits run the risk of legal action.
Debt Brakes and Treaty Requirements
For additional details and discussion, please see Debt Brakes and Treaty Requirements About to Smash the EU.
Hoot of the Day
To achieve a government debt-to-GDP ratio of 60 percent, EU countries will have to reduce spending or raise taxes by 2 percent of GDP, on average, every year for 46 years.
That also presumes no recessions or other emergencies in that timeframe. And this is supposed to be a serious proposal.
Let’s just say it’s not going to happen.
Long Term Fiscal Issues
In addition to the Excessive Debt Proceedings against many countries, every EU county has defense spending issues, climate spending issues, and demographic issues as shown in the following chart.
The above chart is from the ECB report Longer-Term Challenges for Fiscal Policy in the Euro Area
Far Left Goals
The Front’s programme includes scrapping the 2023 French pension reform law, lowering the retirement age, increasing public sector salaries and welfare benefits, raising the minimum wage by 14 percent, and freezing the price of basic food items and energy.
France is Now Ungovernable
The above four words, describe the actual result of Macron’s “success” at keeping the Right out of power.
An October 1, deadline to form a budget looms.
No one in their right mind should want to hold the prime minister’s job right now.
Next year a similar fate awaits Germany. For discussion, please see Far Right Wins First German State Election Since WWII
Yes, as predicted. So far Macron is winning the elections even though his party lost.
My Company had Sales and Support Offices all over the world and in five countries in the EU alone. France was by far our LEAST effective sales office: sales were always lower, productivity was terrible, etc. So, I flew over personally to have a series of probing meetings.
On my first day, where I arrived by Jet on a Friday, I took a taxi to my suite and then on to the office and I arrived at 4:45pm and by 5:01pm, they were fidgeting to go home.
In America, we worked until 9pm every night. THE LAZINESS was the culprit. The French office was closed. They would rather Drink wine than fix their sales problems. I fired them all the day I left, which was a week later only to go to the Netherlands and they were SO productive that it was palpable.
Firing unproductive salesmen is easy. Firing French union members isn’t.
Which sector is your company in?
In the next few years demand for highly skilled workers will rise. In Europe and the US the gov will freeze SS, other gov goodies that inhibit growth and unrealized promises. The gov will fill its coffer and cut debt if they are fully committed to cutting debt. Freezing transfer payments and other goodies during inflation is a higher tax. European retirees climbed on a high tree ==> the French and the German gov will cut the tree.
Supported by the muslim population.
The suspense is palpable. I have no idea who will be the next PM. Generally French presidents prefer PMs that won’t become rivals. That said just about every PM has eventually became a rival so maybe that part is inescapable. On the other hand, since Macron can’t have another term, he should pick someone who can succeed him. We will see/
Strange to see that in the EU Greece is the country with the wisest fiscal policy from the chart.
Please don’t peddle the lie that the economic rules were suspended due to the Wuhan Flu. They were suspended due to the Chicken Little response to the flu outbreak. Just look at the 1968 flu pandemic where things were not locked down and the economy wasn’t damaged as back then they realised the best response was to not panic.
As for describing Le Pen as far right that is hardly true as she and her party are only centre-right with many policies that are not so dissimilar to the centre-left such as worker protection, healthcare and pensions.
Britain Tories screwed up by calling an early election also.
Moral of the story: When you are in power, ALWAYS push off any election as far away as possible.
Mish calls E. Macron’s decision to call a snap election a poor decision, that has left France ungovernable.
— Much the same statement was made of Rishi Sunak’s decision to call an election in July instead of waiting until the last minute.
In both cases the situation was one of doom. Now or later, much the same result. Perhaps the only additional thing Macron could have should have done is call a snap election for president.
Some years ago when there was a similar mess about forming a German government I thought that the best idea might be to give up, and dissolve the Bundes Federal Republic, at least for a while, and each Land (German State) govern itself independently.
The chart called EU Fiscal Challenges by Country is baffling. What does it mean? Are longer bars bad or good? Are bars in negative dips good or bad? What is defence gap or climate change, or how they defined demographic aging.
I guess all would be clear if I studies Eurostatistics instead of engineering.
Didn’t Macron cut a deal before the election with Melanchon to stave off the Evil, Far Right Nazi Le Pen? And now he’s refusing to deal with the Left? Very scorpion of him.
He knows that any left candidate as Prime Minister won’t survive a vote (unlike the US where once elected you serve 2 or 4 years guaranteed, every bill you attempt to pass in parliament has to get 50% or more votes or else it triggers an automatic election) since no one on the right will vote for it and much of the center won’t either which means it will fail.
No, he did not cut a deal before the election. To say they don’t get along is an understatement.
France is a third world Muslim cesspool. France regulated big business out of the country. They taxed the wealthy job creators out of the country. Then they didn’t have enough jobs so they decreed a 35 hour work week. Now they wonder why they are poor.
Let them eat cake.
A brioche is not a cake. The English back then had no equivalent, so they said cake.
One of the hardest economic concepts to grasp is also one of the simplest. It is the fact that the enormous, hyper-complex modern economy is entirely the product of the harnessing of fossil fuel energy.
Because we’ve always used lowest-cost energy resources first, and left costlier alternatives for later, we have, over time, depleted the economic value of coal, oil and natural gas. When the coal economy started to succumb to the effects of depletion in the 1920s, oil was waiting in the wings to take over.
Now, as the economic impetus of petroleum, in its turn, is running down, no such complete successor form of energy exists.
The same ‘depletion effect’ applies to non-energy natural resources as well. Over time, the ore grades of minerals have declined, water has become harder to access, and the productivity of farmland has been driven downwards by monoculture and an over-reliance on chemical stimulus.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/09/02/288-without-the-elixir/
France’s government, like Canada’s and many others, exists solely for the purpose of maintaining public pensions.
Javier Gerardo Milei, and the like, may be the last hope.
What does the 21st century hold? More of the bankrupt same? Or hope?
Wonder what happens when the system understands that an unpayable debt (bloated public pensions) won’t get paid?
Government prints the money and makes the pensions worthless.
Problem is that makes all the savings of everyone else worthless too. That will almost certainly lead to massive social unrest.
Which will be a great excuse to reduce the human population.
At some point there will have to be adult discussions about pensions especially in terms of a mean test.
Someone getting 35K pension shouldn’t and won’t likely see much any reduction. But those making 80K and especially those making 100K will almost certainly be taking large reductions (the idea of teachers / cops / firefighters / lifeguards and such retiring at 55 with 100K+ pensions for decades of retirement isn’t going to fly).
This same mean testing will come to social security too.
Automation and AI replacing an ever increasing number of human jobs until the machines either have to take care of the human population or eliminate it.