Macron 1, France 0
The Fragile Left
By John Foster
The crisis in France epitomises the problems faced by the left in this late neoliberal age.
First, it was the German government. This was easy to see coming since the Free Democrats had been forced to suppress their libertarian instincts by being junior partners in a coalition with the Social Democrats and Greens.
This is not to say that either of those two is waving the red flag of socialism. Pace their Marxist roots; today’s Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands is about as radical as a ham sandwich.
Die Grünen have never been particularly radical about anything other than the environment, and even with respect to that, their politics has always had a sort of “go along to get along” element.
In the last couple of years, they’ve found a way to reconcile themselves to more coal rather than less, so in practice, they’re pretty flexible.
The real problem was that after years of irrelevance, the Freie Demokratische Partei saw an opportunity to exit a limiting political situation by proposing measures it knew its coalition partners would refuse.
The classic strategy of the East German dissident was emigration by publication. For party chief Christian Lindner, this strategy has worked. However, the February election results might tell a different tale.
In Ireland, the other major recent case of coalitional indigestion it was a matter of cutting loose the dead wood (and Leo Varadkar’s wood was very dead).
Unsurprisingly, the result will be yet another version of the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition, which a friend of mine described as Glasnost for real estate speculators.
For all the talk of Sinn Féin’s decline, the election outcome was that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael would have to find helpers. The only ones with enough votes happened to be Ireland’s leftist parties.
This merely emphasises that Sinn Féin’s rise is not about what they will do in power (since they are miles from that kind of outcome) but about what issues their popularity will address.
So now we come to France, where the three-month-old rightwing coalition government was thrown into crisis by a no-confidence vote on a proposed budget, which saw lawmakers of the left cooperating with Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Rally to scupper a proposal to address France’s issues with austerity.
For those with a historical perspective, the image of parliamentarians from the far left and the far right collaborating will evoke disturbing associations.
In this case, the more immediate consequence was that it allowed Emmanuel Macron to rid himself, like Henry II, of neo-Gaullist Prime Minister Michel Barnier. This was his preferred strategy all along.
Macron has been president of the Republic since 2017. His chief selling points have been: 1. I am not Le Pen, and 2. I am a technocrat who can effectively run the national economy. At this point, he is a 50/50 proposition.
Certainly, Macron is not Le Pen. His is a big-tent neoliberalism, in which everyone is invited to participate in the Hobbesian struggle of trying to make a profit in Germany’s next-door neighbour.
However, far from generating positive outcomes, Macron’s management of the French economy has led to moderate increases in per capita GDP and a significant deterioration of national finances.
The post-COVID economic recovery has been sluggish, and if forecasts are correct, the budget deficit will have increased by around 25% by the end of 2024 (from 4.8% to 6.2% of GDP).
Macron’s response is reminiscent of Mel Brooks’s 1974 comedy Blazing Saddles in which Cleavon Little faces down a white racist mob by pointing a gun at his own head and pretending to hold himself hostage.
Macron has shown that whatever the French might have thought they were voting for in the summer, they will get a repetition of Macronomics, in which the economic gains of the rich are protected. The burden of recouping the losses falls on those at the other end of the economic spectrum.
The coalition of the left (the collectively led Nouveau Front Populaire) has not been happy with the direction of things since the formation of the governing coalition. Their choice for prime minister would not have been Barnier, who it was felt lacked legitimacy, but Socialist Party economist Luci Castets.
Barnier’s government tried to force through social security cuts using Article 49.3 of the French constitution. This allows measures to be passed by the government without a vote unless parliament passes a no-confidence motion.
The leadership of the Nouveau Front Populaire has previously specified that they would do just this if Barnier adopted this tactic. They were joined in doing so by Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National, who wanted Barnier gone because his presence frustrated their will to power.
Now, we are confronted with the prospect of another Macron-appointed government until new parliamentary elections can be staged again in June 2025.
At least the Nouveau Front Populaire stuck to its guns and employed the nuclear option (so to speak) to prevent the passage of a budget that ran directly counter to what it felt it had been put in place to make happen.
Meanwhile, the Rassemblement National thinks Michel Barnier’s fall will reduce the purchase achieved by Les Republicains, the neo-Gaullist party in which he has his base.
The chaos arising from another election so soon after the previous one is probably also a plus from Marine Le Pen’s perspective.
However, she faces the possibility of being convicted of embezzling European Union funds, a €300,000 fine, five years in prison and a five-year ban from public office, which would prohibit Len Pen from running in the 2027 presidential election, which she hopes to win.
Prosecutors rested their case against Le Pen on 27 November, and a decision is forthcoming by the end of March.
For now, the winner is Macron. Ever the canny politician, he has managed to fob off the gridlock in which French politics is currently enmeshed as a phenomenon resulting from the extremes of the political spectrum confronting each other.
France’s president can once again present himself as the technocratic representative of the so-called radical centre, ready to take whatever technical measures are needed to refloat the French economy without being weighed down by the ideological baggage at either end of the political spectrum.
If the Nouveau Front Populaire can survive until the next election, it could win by an even bigger margin than it did this year. Disaffection with Emmanuel Macron’s handling of the economy and the legal problems plaguing Marine Le Pen will only worsen, and the Front can only benefit from that.
As of this article’s writing, the Socialists had agreed to meet with Macron about joining his next government. Of course, there’s no guarantee they will. But their willingness to discuss the possibility reminds us of how fragile the left coalition is and why it still might fail to realise its promise.
Photograph courtesy of Nykaule. Published under a Creative Commons license.
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