My friend Guillaume recently hit on a perfect analogy for French politics: in a scene from Succession, Logan Roy’s children ask him why he is putting them through so much misery, and why he won’t just turn his company over to them. To which the surly CEO says: “I love you, but you are not serious people.”
The beauty of the Fifth Republic’s institutions is how flexible they are. When there is a clear majority, the system is presidential. When there’s not, it’s parliamentary. Except, a parliament with no clear majority requires serious people willing to do the difficult work of forming a coalition that is able to govern. And unfortunately, France’s collection of leftwing parties were unable to be serious about what governing entails.
French voters are upset with Macron – and rightly so – for naming the EU’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier as prime minister. Barnier’s political family, Les Républicains, has only 47 seats (of 577) in the national assembly, and he will only survive no-confidence votes at the discretion of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) – the party that leftwing and centrist voters voted strategically to block. The disillusionment alone is a vast danger in a time when voters everywhere are losing faith in their democracies. Macron’s ego, his inability to accept having been wrong and to learn from it, ultimately swallowed his presidency.
But this situation is also the fault of the far-left leader Jean Luc Mélenchon’s extreme intransigence. The entire left alliance, the New Popular Front (NFP), won more seats in the July elections than any other bloc but still lacks a majority. It has only 182 out of 577 seats in parliament. Of those, 71 belong to Mélenchon’s party, France Unbowed (LFI). And yet, Mélenchon – who is like Macron in one specific way: the widespread rejection he as a person elicits among the French at large – and others in his party insisted that the left would enact “its programme, nothing but the programme, but all of the programme”.
There is just as much contempt for democracy in LFI’s “our way or the highway” approach as there was in Macron’s nomination of Barnier. The difference is that it failed, and Mélenchon’s obstinacy torpedoed the one real shot that the NFP had in governing the country and enacting some portion of its programme – Laurence Tubiana.
The NFP had nearly seven weeks to assemble a majority coalition. It could have put serious effort into building a coalition with other parties (a numerical necessity) behind France’s most high-profile international climate diplomat and key architect of Cop21’s Paris agreement as a consensus candidate. Instead, it fought and bickered for weeks, before tepidly landing on someone with no experience in governing, negotiating or coalition-building at a national or international level, and who more or less nobody had ever heard of. It was clear from day one that Lucie Castets was not going to solve the parliamentary casse-tête.
But there is a nugget of hope for the left: Barnier may be a blessing in disguise. The country is not going to be simple to govern, and whatever political instability or legislative failures follow will be owned by Macron and Barnier. The left will be able to run from the far easier place of opposition, not incumbency, in 2027. But to have a real second chance, it will have to truly break from Mélenchon in the way that the UK’s Labour party broke from Corbyn, and it will have to “get serious” about its economic programme.
The French left often speaks as if France were the United States – in the throes of neoliberalism with relatively low government spending, a huge margin to raise tax rates, and with the “exorbitant privilege” of printing the world’s reserve currency. But France is not the US. It has one of the highest levels of taxation and the highest public spending relative to GDP (57.3 %) in the OECD, an unsustainable budget deficit, and a debt verging on unsustainable as well. When 10.9% of all French state spending currently goes to servicing existing debt, that is a leftwing issue: it means that €52bn a year is not being invested in green energy, sustainable agriculture, university facilities, research and public housing.
France has a modern service and knowledge economy, where more than a fifth of the labour force either works for a small business or is self-employed, and where one of the areas actually growing – tech – requires investors to risk huge amounts of capital for very uncertain future payoffs. The left needs to speak to these people not about what the economy looked like in the 1970s, but about what it is going to look like tomorrow. And yet, in the whole of the NFP’s programme, AI wasn’t mentioned once.
Not all of this is purely about Mélenchon’s left. Even the centre left has failed to offer productive ways to reform the retirement system. The only thing that a majority of parliamentarians and the French public (everyone but Macron’s centrist coalition) agree on is their dislike of the retirement reform, which they pledge to repeal. But there’s no repealing the maths behind it: there are just fewer workers for every retiree than there were a generation ago.
Are there ways around this? Undoubtedly. France could, for example, set up a system of public pension funds – modelled on its collection of non-profit health “mutuals” that form the backbone of its well-designed and effective hybrid public-private universal healthcare system – to redistribute market gains back to workers. Or, for a country firmly committed to a retirement system based on “repartition”, the centre-left could propose some type of points-based system that applied a multiplier to all years worked prior to the age of 25, to account for the disparity between those who go to university and those who begin working early (most likely in jobs that take a bigger physical toll). Workers could have the choice to take their additional points in either time (departing for retirement at a younger age) or money (by benefiting from a boosted monthly payment).
France – and Europe – face many challenges. War still rages in Ukraine, and an unreformed unanimous requirement means the EU has no effective foreign policy voice on Gaza. A humanitarian crisis and disaster of massive proportions is happening in Sudan. The EU needs to plan for a worst-case scenario in the US in November. Mario Draghi’s report on competitiveness published this week warns of the risk of Europe’s decline, and recommends an €800bn-a-year spending boost to maintain the foundation of competitiveness and innovation that can underwrite the green transition and a strong European social state into the future.
To act on any of it, though, the French left is going to have to jettison its obstructionists – and become a force capable of building coalitions and governing.
Alexander Hurst is a Guardian Europe columnist
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