RW Johnson: Macron at Bay

Key topics:France faces crisis with 3 PMs in a year, no workable government.Macron’s centrist bloc lost majority; coalition talks fail.Pension reform, elections, and history shape current deadlock..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By RW Johnson.The current political crisis in France – three different prime ministers in a year but no workable government – has shocked many Francophiles, both in Europe and beyond. With Europe braced against a destructive Russia, the EU cannot afford its second biggest member and sole nuclear power to be thus out of commission. Moreover there is a feeling of surprise and disappointment: surely, this is a return to the bad old days of the Fourth Republic – which had 25 governments in the space of twelve years (1946-58) ? Wasn’t the whole point of De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic to get rid of such weak and unstable governments thanks to the firm hand of a strong presidential executive ? And for most of the Fifth Republic’s duration (67 years to date) that has indeed been the case, so what has gone wrong now?To answer this, we need to go back into history. When De Gaulle was brought back to power in 1958 France was on the verge of civil war. The army had mutinied in Algeria and the mutineers had then taken over Corsica and were on the brink of launching a paratrooper assault on Paris. For the first four years De Gaulle was preoccupied with dealing with the Algerian crisis. He repeatedly called referenda, making sure that his U-turn to giving Algeria independence was backed by popular majorities. This infuriated the French pieds noirs (settlers) in Algeria and some within the army, producing endless assassination attempts on De Gaulle. Parliament gave no trouble at all: the deputies knew they had failed to deal with the Algerian crisis, wanted De Gaulle to deal with it – and be gone..Read more:.RW Johnson: The denouement of Emmanuel Macron.Knowing this, in 1962 De Gaulle announced a referendum on making the presidency directly elected by the people. The deputies, realising that this would make the change to a strong presidency irreversible, revolted and voted no confidence. Which was just what De Gaulle wanted: he dissolved parliament and called for fresh elections. He then won the referendum by a large majority and the Gaullist party, campaigning in his successful slipstream, and together with a few conservative allies, won the first outright majority in French history. This inaugurated a further seven years of authoritative presidential rule by De Gaulle. He won the presidential election in 1965 and the Gaullists won overall majorities in the elections of 1967 and 1968. Georges Pompidou won the presidency in 1969 and the Gaullists retained their majority in the 1973 election and although Pompidou died in 1974 his successor, Valery Giscard d’Estaing, ruled with a conservative majority through to 1981. Then came Francois Mitterrand, whose presidential victory was followed by a sweeping Socialist majority in the subsequent parliamentary election. So although the Left had come to power, strong presidential rule, backed by a legislative majority, continued until 1986.It’s worth pointing out that nobody, not even De Gaulle, had anticipated this era of strong and consecutive parliamentary majorities. They arrived as a simple political fact, providing a whole generation of political stability and economic growth – for business now felt assured that it would not face political shocks so investment flowed freely and with long time horizons. In 1986 Jacques Chirac won a conservative parliamentary majority but Mitterrand managed to live with that for two years before again winning the presidency and a Socialist parliamentary majority until 1995. Chirac then won the presidency, had to put up with a Socialist prime minister from 1997 but then won re-election in 2002 and, as was now customary, called fresh parliamentary elections and pulled in a fresh conservative majority of his own followers. This pattern was repeated under Presidents Sarkozy and Hollande until Emmanuel Macron swept to power in 2017, defeating Marine Le Pen in the presidential run-off, for her Rassemblement National had become the dominant force on the Right.And Macron was different. He ran as a Centrist and in France the Centre was a loose melange of small parties and local personalities. Nonetheless, once elected Macron called fresh parliamentary elections and launched his own list, La Republique en Marche – which won an overall majority. But after five years in power Macron’s pro-business policies had alienated some voters both on the Left and Right, so although Macron won re-election, Le Pen now took a formidable 41.5% on the second round and in the subsequent parliamentary election the Centre (now re-christened Ensemble – Together) won only 245 seats, 44 short of a majority. Nonetheless, the government was able to soldier on thanks to support from the Republicans (the old Gaullists).Then came the 2024 Euro-elections. Ensemble saw its vote fall from 22.4% to 14.6% while the RN rose from 23.3% to 31.4%. Stung by this result and the growing possibility that Marine Le Pen might succeed him as the President, Macron called a wholly unnecessary parliamentary election, saying France needed “greater clarity” - only to see Ensemble fall from 245 seats to 159. The RN rose from 89 seats to 142. Since then Macron has appointed three prime ministers but the basic arithmetic is not in his favour so none of them last long.Now even Edouard Philippe, a previous prime minister and the Centre’s presumptive presidential candidate, is appealing to Macron to resign, saying the country can’t carry on like this for another two years, when Macron’s term ends. Macron has sworn not to do that: it would mean ending his presidency as a self-admitted failure.A second option would be fresh parliamentary elections, but there is no real prospect that they would leave Macron better off than he is now, so he refuses that option too.The last option is to try to cobble together a coalition government with the help of the Socialists. But they, like the rest of the Opposition, say that their price would be for Macron to reverse his crucial pension reform which raised the pensionable age to a still low 64. Getting that reform through was Macron’s greatest achievement and it is fiscally essential: as it is, the national debt is well over 110% of GDP and the budget deficit is 5.8%, not the 3% of GDP that the EU demands. The French state old age pension is relatively generous – 30% higher than its British equivalent – and without Macron’s reform the state would quickly bankrupt itself. Having fought the Opposition to a standstill in order to get that reform through, Macron is naturally unwilling to budge.The Opposition parties of Right and Left want either or both a parliamentary and a presidential election and the RN refuses to negotiate about a coalition, saying it is a waste of time.What this boils down to is that the Fifth Republican system works best if the President has a parliamentary majority of his own supporters. Despite all the ways in which De Gaulle strengthened the Presidency, a President facing a hostile parliamentary majority can do very little. But the best way to achieve that is for a candidate to win the presidency and then call a parliamentary election, using his/her presidential coat-tails to help reel in the legislative majority that he/she needs.This logic worked perfectly in 2017. Macron, then at the peak of his popularity, won the presidential election comfortably and then used his coat-tails to pull in a comfortable majority for his freshly minted party. But France is not an easy country to govern. Its politics are fractious and the electorate has a habit of wanting incompatible things. When De Gaulle took power the voters wanted to keep Algerie francaise, no matter what. But they also desperately wanted the Algerian war to end. De Gaulle realised this was an either/or question: while France held on to Algeria, the war would go on, endlessly. So he used dramatic referenda to force the voters to choose one or the other, threatening his own resignation if they didn’t follow his lead. This worked – and it is very possible that Macron should have followed this example and put his pension reform to a referendum, making clear that national bankruptcy would follow a NON vote and promising to resign himself if they didn’t vote OUI.Instead he ploughed through his first term without bringing up the matter, although it had been obvious for years that a pension reform was desperately needed. This was a bad mistake: to get such a reform through he needed to use his popularity while it was at its high point. Instead he waited until his second term. By that time the stresses and strains of governing had weakened both his never very solid Centre bloc and his own personal popularity, causing the Centre to lose its majority in 2022. Even then he might have soldiered through the rest of his term with a patchwork coalition had he not called the quite unnecessary parliamentary election in 2024 – an even greater mistake.Had Macron studied the electoral history of the Fifth Republic he would have seen that De Gaulle’s use of referenda had worked because he asked wide-open questions on matters of huge national importance, and because he made it clear that he would resign if he didn’t get the result he wanted. These were immensely dramatic consultations and they produced record voting turnouts. However, later presidents were tempted to call referenda on relatively minor issues simply in order to re-confirm their own popularity. This always backfired: turnout was low and they either got a NON vote or such a poor OUI that it didn’t help them. This even happened to De Gaulle. After the May Events of 1968 and the huge Gaullist party victory won essentially by Pompidou, De Gaulle called an unnecessary referendum on regional reform simply because he wanted a OUI vote to strengthen his personal position. The result was that he lost the referendum, causing him to resign. Since then presidents have been very reluctant to call referenda.But the principle applies to elections too. If the French think that a referendum or an election has been called unnecessarily or simply to bolster the position of a sitting government, they are extremely likely to punish whoever called it. Which is exactly what happened in 2024. Any reasonably competent pollster should have warned Macron not to call an election simply in order to damage Le Pen’s rising star: to do so was to risk getting his face smacked. But if anyone did advise him thus, they were ignored and the electorate not only punished Macron but gave Le Pen another major boost. This was entirely predictable..Read more:. RW Johnson: French surprise – Left surges, Macron’s centrists struggle.In other words Macron has got himself – and the system – into this uncomfortable mess because he is a managerial technocrat who has never adapted himself to the French political culture. Indeed, his whole attempt to create a majority centrist party deliberately ignored all prevailing French political tradition. Edouard Philippe is right: the best thing would be for Macron to resign, forcing a dramatic new presidential election. One way or another that would end the present crisis and introduce a new president with a national mandate. (Since only the top two candidates go through to the second round of a presidential election, one of them must get over 50% of the vote.) But Macron refuses on principle both resignation and a fresh election of any kind, so all he is left with is the decision to go on trying to appoint a new prime minister capable of winning a vote of confidence in parliament. Probably the only way to do that is to appoint a Socialist premier to head a government of the centre-left. To date Macron has refused this option and has doggedly kept appointing premiers drawn from his own party. He may try that yet again, but it won’t work. In the end the choice may come down to accepting a Socialist premier – or Macron’s own resignation. Meanwhile, the crisis continues, the markets are in disarray and the country lacks a budget. France is paying a high price for the political education of Emmanuel Macron.

RW Johnson: Macron at Bay

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