The French Far Left says it is ready to govern. Halleluiah? A catfight is coming up, advantage National Rally.
The Left is Ready to Govern! Halleluiah?
France24 reports Leftist Alliance ‘Ready to Govern’ after Trouncing Macron’s Ruling Party.
France’s snap legislative elections on Sunday showed the leftist New Popular Front leading both Macron’s ruling party and the right-wing National Rally but falling short of an absolute majority, according to Ipsos Talan projections. One of the coalition’s leaders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far-left France Unbowed party, urged Macron to invite them to form a government, saying the alliance “is ready to govern”.
What Comes Next?
Reuters asks What Comes Next After No Party Wins Majority
Will a Left-Leaning Coalition Form?
This is far from certain. France is not accustomed to the kind of post-election coalition-building that is common in northern European parliamentary democracies like Germany or the Netherlands.
Its Fifth Republic was designed in 1958 by war hero Charles de Gaulle to give large, stable parliamentary majorities to presidents and that has created a confrontational political culture with no tradition of consensus and compromises.
Plea to Act Like Adults
Moderate leftwing politician Raphael Glucksmann, a lawmaker in the European Parliament, said the political class would have to “act like grown-ups”.
Well, good luck with that plea.
None of the three blocs can form a majority government. They will need support from others to pass legislation.
Let’s check in on the Left
A Duty Call by the Left
Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI), ruled out a broad coalition of parties of different stripes.
He said Macron had a duty to call on the leftist alliance to rule.
Centrists Ready and Willing
In the centrist camp, Macron’s party head, Stephane Sejourne, said he was ready to work with mainstream parties but ruled out any deal with Melenchon’s LFI.
Former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe also ruled out any deal with the hard-left party.
Dear Delusional Centrists
Dear delusional centrists who refuse to deal with either the Left or the Right, I believe you need a math lesson.
A majority is 289.
If you gather the maximum coalition, you get 158+7+67 = 232 as shown in the lead chart.
As an added bonus, I will magically award your coalition 14 seats from the unaffiliated Left.
Ta da. You now have 246, needing only 289.
What If No Agreement Can Be Found?
That would be uncharted territory for France. The constitution says Macron cannot call new parliamentary elections for another 12 months.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said he would tender his resignation to Macron on Monday morning, but that he was available to act in a care-taker capacity.
The constitution says Macron decides who to ask to form a government. But whoever he picks faces a confidence vote in the National Assembly, which will convene for 15 days on July 18.
This means Macron needs to name someone acceptable to a majority of lawmakers.
No Agreement Questions and Answers
Q: Is there anyone acceptable to the far Left except someone on the far Left?
A: According to Melenchon, no
Q: Is there anyone acceptable to the far Right except someone on the far Right?
A: Certainly not.
Q: Is there a center Majority?
A: No
There Is No Magic Solution
There is no magic solution and that was evident immediately from the preliminary results, at least to anyone who can do simple math.
Despite the obvious math problem, perhaps some coalition government compromise forms out of this mess. Just don’t expect it to be stable.
On some issues, notably retirement age, the Far Left and Far Right are aligned. How’s that supposed to ever work?
The Far Right
Many on the Right, especially those in the US, object to the label “Far Right” for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party. OK objection heard.
Marine Le Pen is not who she used to be. She has moved towards the center but is still quite a bit Right of Les Republicans.
National Rally, no matter how you label them, is likely smart enough to not cooperate at all in whatever caretaker government, if any, does form. That has been my base case from the start.
Far Left Pyrrhic Victory
If they the far Right achieved an outright majority, they would have choked on it.
I discussed this in advance on June 30: President Macron’s Party Blown Out in First Round of French Parliament Elections
The center cannot hold, yet it rules out forming a coalition with either the Left or Right.
It would be very smart of National Rally to stay out of the fight until the next presidential election in 2027.
To understand why please see Debt Brakes and Treaty Requirements About to Smash the EU.
Also see see France is Now Ungovernable Following a Pyrrhic Victory for the Left-Green Alliance
Macron will regret these snap elections. He is the big loser in this.
The ultimate winner in this election will be the party that can stay as far away from the Center/Left catfight as possible.
National Rally is only party that has a chance to stay out of the mess, and that is what I expect them to do.
I appreciate the analysis. The media reports on the French elections, but I always like to hear Mish’s thoughts on it.
What National Rally, or the Republicans, need to do is formulate a response to the coming financial crisis that the French government is going to face. Then again, that would have to be a reasonable response that takes seriously the prospect of reducing regulation of the economy and generating more dynamic labor and capital markets. That is something no party has been particularly good at accomplishing, but if the Far Left and Macron’s state centrists fail, and there’s a good chance they will, the Right needs to be able to move forward and present a realistic alternative. And then be prepared to quickly quash the inevitable leftist rioting that will occur.
MOAR Socialism will fix everything.
On one hand, this is another page of what Pat Buchanan wrote about more than a decade ago. Back c.400 AD what is now France underwent a profound change, when the Barbarians (mostly Francs) defeated the Romans and conquered the place. It set France on a new historical path and altered the language.
Two presidents ago, when Francois Hollande was elected president, I remember a news photo of his supporters celebrating at a monument in Paris, waving flags. None of those flags were the French flag, instead those were the flags of the countries that those immigrants came from. ; I have heard of something similar this time, celebrations and none of the flags being waved were French. It was a Frenchman who wrote about ‘The Great Replacement Theory’.
Referring to Jchb who wrote “… being unable to pass any legislation a win for the public at large.” France is headed to the problem of being legally obligated to pay many benefits to the population, having no money to pay those benefits, has maxed out its ability to tax and, as a Euro country, has no ability to print Euros, to inflate the currency.
When the people don’t receive their benefit checks, expect Cloward-Piven riots demanding payment. I don’t know what then follows. It will be ugly to watch, and worse to live it.
Meanwhile, across the Channel: The new leftist British Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer has on day one of his premiership scrapped a scheme to deport illegal immigrants to Rwanda which was devised by the previous Conservative government but never properly implemented.
The previous Conservative government came very late to the game to address immigration, and Rwanda was ever at best a convenient ruse. They could have stopped the immigrants in the English Channel, but over and over refused to do so. Labour is just formalizing the policy already in place and dropping the patent lie of Rwanda.
The CAC40 is up half a percent so investors are not spooked.
After the first election round, the polls were predicting Le Pen’s party getting well over 200 deputies. The party members expected even more so when they ended up with only 142 seats, they and everybody else saw it rightly as a failure since the second-round voting cut them back considerably. The electoral quarantine that keeps Le Pen’s party far from power showed it worked again.
“France is not accustomed to the kind of post-election coalition-building that is common in northern European parliamentary democracies like Germany or the Netherlands.”
That is true and they will have to learn. I might add that Macron’s party is itself a coalition of moderate left and moderate right tendencies the government contains elements of both so they will have to find 20 or 30 deputies willing to work with them to get legislation passed.
As for the next PM he will come from the moderate Left probably but certainly not from the far-left.
One very important thing that you haven’t mentioned is that now the government is very vulnerable to a vote of no confidence if the two rival blocks decide to vote together but that brings in another problem for them. It is easy to vote for a no confidence measure if you are sure it won’t pass. It is another thing if it does pass because then you will have to form a government of the far-left and far-right together and no one from the center. That is the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads because they will have to own the result and it has a very high possibly of being a disaster.
In France the political spectrum is not like in the US because they are all more or less socialist in nature so the definition of right and left is not that much on economic issues but more on sovereignty ones. Le Pen’s party is very close on economic issues to that of the Left and even the far-left sometimes. In reality, the Center is the only party that advocates sound (relatively speaking) economic policies. However on sovereignty and identity issues they are as far apart as is possible with one advocating the “creolization” of France and the other advocating the complete opposite.
It is going to be an interesting time.
“they are all more or less socialist in nature”
Yes, and at the same time they have constantly voted for governments, which, through Europe, have constantly favored the opening of borders and the freedom of movement of capital. These same governments virtually destroyed French industry, and partially agriculture. So what the French have constantly voted for: sharing more and more of the wealth produced, while producing less and less and driving away the most productive people. it could only succeed
As a percentage of the number of voters:
2022 legislative elections:
Le Pen’s party: 17.3%
Macron: 38.57%
left: 31.6%
2024 legislative elections:
Le Pen’s party: 33.15%
Macron: 20%
left: 27.99%
So Le Pen’s victory is incontestable, even if the voting method reduces this superiority in number of voters.
But it is true that if we only get our information from the French mainstream media, we can have the impression of the opposite. Because the days leading up to the election saw considerable collective hysteria over the possible coming of Le Pen’s party to power. The fact that it doesn’t happen causes considerable relief and a feeling of victory.
Another consequence of these figures is that if the left obtains the post of prime minister, it will represent an even smaller share of the population than Macron’s party previously represented.
From the Washington Post article today, and it seems the New Popular Front is more pro-immigration than Macron’s party. Adn it wants to undo Macron’s reforms such as to pensions and social welfare spending. Seems like a pipe dream even more than what the United Kingdom’s Labor Party plans.
“The New Popular Front wants to lower France’s retirement age and vastly expand government spending on social welfare, environmental protection and health care.”
By the way, MEPs from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally are set to join the Patriots for Europe today, making the new far-right group the third-largest in the European Parliament, several people involved in the discussions told POLITICO.
https://x.com/POLITICOEurope/status/1810106371192344855
The Patriots for Europe with Le Pen’s contribution now have 80 members out of 720 total members of the European Parliament.
Now let’s consider some history.
The flaws of the Fourth Republic were rectified by the Fifth Republic which gave France a very strong executive branch and eliminated the tendency of governments falling every few weeks or so.
So, does that make France more like the last days of the Weimar Republic that I described in 3) above? Where the government can’t do anything without relying on the decree power of the president?
Will the resolution of the problem, and the problems underlying the problem, = a ‘revolution’? And what sort of revolution?
The true parallel would be the years of the 1930’s where France was torn between the two political extremes that created instability and greatly contributed to the lack of preparation for war with Germany. Today in France we do not have Weimar levels of inflation. It is nowhere near those levels so you can’t use that as an example. The Fifth Republic Constitution was specifically tailored to prevent that type of instability by De Gaulle who had lived thought that period.
This result is actually a victory for LePen. All she has to do, is nothing.
Yes, stay out of the fray, but also present a vision of stability and economic solutions to the problems that France and other European nations are facing: the existential threat of immigration and of the EU.
correct – at least as I see it
Burning someone else’s buildings down represents the type of people who got the most votes in France’s election.
Sadly, November 5th 2024, history will rhyme.
It’s the inevitable result of debt-based economics (creditism) and socialism, and the threat of social implosion from immigration.
“Burning someone else’s buildings down represents the type of people who got the most votes in France’s election.”
When the election is between those who want to do that, and those who instead bans other people from building any building at all: What’s the difference?
Socialist parasites want what you earned. All of it.
And like zombis, after they have fed, they will resume destroying everything, in a giant protracted tantrum against civilization.
Macron is a arrogant pompous ass.
You could think of him as the Gavin Newsom of France
Or vice versa. They are all Blair clones.
It’s quite normal for French to be giant pompous asses.
True and Mélenchon is even more pompous and arrogant.
I would say the entire European educated/political class is pompous and disdainful of the common man no matter which country they come from.
I would view the inability to form a majority and therefore being unable to pass any legislation a win for the public at large.
He governs best who governs least.
How many from Macron’s party (the French “centrists”) and from the non-affiliated centrist parties form a coalition with the center right party (“French Republicans”) and the far right party (Le Pen) to get to 289 seats ?
Le Pen could make concessions to Macron’s party as part of this, since the New Popular Front has already said it was to undo Macron’s reforms as far as pensions, social welfare spending, etc.
Only if you have confidence in the bureaucracy who will not only administer the state but set policy as they see fit without debate or transparency.
How will the bankers and marxists form a majority so they can continue to govern behind the scenes? Quite a dilemma…grab your popcorn.
One likes to build; the other likes to destroy.
“How will the bankers and marxists form a majority so they can continue to govern behind the scenes?”
The same way as in the US: By being exactly the same people. Both similarly economically illiterate, and both incapable of anything more productive than just leeching and feeding off of more productive lifeforms. After all, what is a bankster, aside from a Party apparatchik who lives off of taxing productive people by way of debasement, rather than by (only slightly) more direct means.
They agree on one important thing already:deficits spending must go on.