President Emmanuel Macron launches negotiations with different party leaders this Friday in a latest effort to bring an end to six weeks of political deadlock following snap legislative elections. Macron seems set on forging a broad coalition that would likely include his own defeated centre-right bloc – though whether he can successfully fracture the forces arrayed against him remains far from certain.
It’s been six weeks since French voters turned out in force to vote in the snap legislative elections called by President Emmanuel Macron and France still doesn’t have a government. Or rather, it has the same one – the same cabinet led by the same prime minister occupying a caretaker role despite resigning after a leftist alliance beat Macron’s coalition to win the most seats in parliament.
Since then, time has stood still. As the world’s eyes turned to Paris for the 2024 Summer Games, the president unilaterally declared an “Olympic truce”, saying he would make no decision on a new head of government until the last of the confetti had been swept out of the stadiums.
The truce is now well and truly over. As the French trickle back from their summer holidays, Macron has invited the different parliamentary and party leaders to take part in a series of talks at the Elysée Palace to find a way out of the deadlock. The discussions begin this Friday with the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) alliance, which won the largest number of seats while still falling far short of an absolute majority.
The party leaders will bring with them their prime ministerial candidate Lucie Castets, an economist and civil servant with a record of fighting financial crime. The leftist coalition has called on Macron to name Castets prime minister, noting that France’s premier traditionally hails from the political group with the most seats in parliament.
Read moreFrance’s leftist New Popular Front wins a shock victory – but now the hard part begins
Although the president’s choice of prime minister doesn’t require formal approval from the National Assembly, deputies can launch a vote of no-confidence to immediately overturn a government. With the National Assembly now divided into three political blocs with three radically different political programmes, this looks like a very real possibility.
Macron has declined to appoint Castets, insisting that the parties instead work together to forge a broader coalition that could withstand any such no-confidence vote in the National Assembly. The president has made it clear that his preference would be for a coalition stretching from the centre-left Socialists, currently one of the two major parties in the NFP, to the traditional conservative Les Républicains – and including, naturally, his own centre-right bloc as well.
Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party and the left-wing France Unbowed, the other main pillar of the NFP coalition, would have no place in this grouping.
To that end, a number of other names have started to make their rounds through the halls of power. Among them are Xavier Bertrand, a former minister under conservative president Jacques Chirac, right-leaning former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier and Bernard Cazeneuve, who served as prime minister under unpopular Socialist president François Hollande.
This last name seems hand-picked to appeal to more moderate Socialists uneasy at sharing power with their France Unbowed coalition partners and who might be tempted by Macron’s vision of a broader coalition. The question of whether or not it’s enough to splinter the leftist alliance remains urgent and, like much of French politics at the moment, uncertain.
On the sidelines
France has been in uncharted waters since the legislative elections, according to David Todd, professor of modern history at Sciences Po University in Paris.
“There’s no precedent in the [post-1958] Fifth Republic to the situation we’re in,” he said. “The current situation can only be provisional – everyone’s just getting ready for the next election, whether that’s a general or a presidential election. It’s not really about running a government, but about running an electoral campaign.”
In the meantime, just what the other parties can do to force Macron’s hand is unclear. Leading figures from France Unbowed threatened on Sunday to impeach the president if he won’t appoint Castets as prime minister. The other members of the coalition have distanced themselves from the ultimatum, and any attempt at impeachment would have to be passed by two-thirds of both houses of parliament.
For now, it seems, Macron continues to set the tempo.
Read moreMacron's political woes cast shadow over Olympic spectacle
Todd said that he believed that Macron was playing for time in the hope that the political forces arrayed against him would fall to infighting.
“I think my sense is that he’s just waiting for all the others to make fools of themselves, to seem so ridiculous that his own party will seem like the only reasonable option,” he said.
But he may not be the only one hoping to play the waiting game.
Marine Le Pen and her protégé Jordan Bardella, whose far-right National Rally came third in the second round of the legislative elections, will be taking their turn to speak with Macron on Monday. It’s unclear what, if anything, they’re hoping to get from the talks, having seemingly decided to distance themselves from whatever cobbled-together coalition emerges from this gridlock. Instead, Todd said, the party was likely looking ahead to the 2027 presidential election.
“I still think they’re going to come out the winners of this political wrangling, because they’re not even involved,” Todd said. “By continuing to be excluded, they’re the only ones who won’t look too involved in the political maneuvers.”
One man, one vote
France’s president wields immense discretionary power in the Fifth Republic. There are no formal requirements for when the president has to appoint a prime minister following legislative elections, or even who they have to appoint – though a vote of no-confidence can quickly be brought against a nominee who doesn’t enjoy parliamentary support.
Macron’s delay in naming a prime minister has not gone unremarked.
"This Olympic truce is not just because Emmanuel Macron is tired, it is because he wants time," Greens leader Marine Tondelier said during the Games, adding that the president was trying "to obstruct any attempt at political change”.
Federica Genovese, professor of political science and international relations at the University of Oxford, said that while the president seemed to be taking full advantage of the powers of his office, the political gridlock was not solely of his making.
“I do think Macron has availed himself of the importance of personal politics, has assigned himself a huge role in the whole process, and perhaps in doing so put institutions and policymaking a bit too much at risk,” she said. “However, I think the uncertainty and ambiguity were in the making and exist for structural reasons that are not only due to Macron.”
Waiting games
While France’s political parties wait for an audience with the president, the caretaker government has not been idle. On Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal sent spending limits for 2025 to each ministry as part of broader preparations for next year’s budget. Under these limits, state spending for 2025 would be frozen at current levels. Taking inflation into account, the freeze represents about €10 billion in budget cuts – in line with the outgoing government’s policy of reducing the country’s public deficit.
Unlike the choice of prime minister, the preparation and passing of France’s budget follows a strict timetable, with the budget having to be put before parliament at the start of October following a series of consultations. It must be passed before January 1 of the following year.
Despite the prime minister’s office insisting that the budget would be subject to change by both the incoming government as well as parliament, Attal’s decision was met with horror by some on the left, who decried it as a continuation of Macronist austerity measures lacking any democratic mandate.
“We’re in a completely grotesque situation,” France Unbowed euro-deputy Manon Aubry told local broadcaster LCI. “We have a caretaker prime minister who’s sending these guidelines to caretaker ministers who everyone knows are going to go…”
Communist Party Senator and spokesperson Ian Brossat described the decision as “mind-blowing”.
“Disavowed at the ballot box, stripped of legitimacy, he would do better to freeze any initiative that goes beyond the management of day-to-day affairs,” he wrote on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
It's not the only action taken by the caretaker government that has raised hackles. Since resigning en masse in July, the government has passed a number of decrees that have been accused of going beyond the day-to-day business of keeping the country afloat.
A range of ministerial decrees included authorising the suspension of mandatory rest days for certain agricultural workers, particularly during intense harvest periods; millions of euros in funding cuts for a judicial body dedicated to the protection of minors; and the freezing of €10 billion in additional budget appropriations. With no clear precedent on how to define the limits of a caretaker government’s powers, the outgoing cabinet has continued to make its own judgements on where to draw the line.
But Genovese said that the question of whether or not the caretaker government was exceeding its mandate was far from clear-cut.
“I cannot comment on the details of Attal’s day-to-day work, but my understanding is that Attal was ready to resign and was pretty much kept in office without a clear vision of what would come next,” she said. “I am not sure we can talk about undemocratic outreach for power here. The political situation is volatile, and France is not exactly living a period of economic boom. I suspect that all of that – plus the Olympic Games in the middle of the summer – created a limbo that Macron now hopes to solve, at his own conditions.”
