Macron's big idea has failed - and France is practically no longer governable

WORLD Macron's big idea has failed - and France is practically no longer governable Martina Meister • 1 month • 5 minutes reading time Months after the election, France is getting a new prime minister and now a new government. But observers believe that this is doomed to failure - or Macron will resign beforehand. Because a decisive prerequisite is missing. Emmanuel Macron has been president since 2017, and in 2022 he was re-elected for another five years AP Since French President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly in June in a crazy decision and called new elections, many French people have felt like they were in the political Netflix series "Baron Noir". But Macron has clearly lost control of the script. There are surprising twists and turns in this first season, modest high points, but also a lot of weariness. Everything seems to be geared towards a sequel, simply because the life expectancy of the new government is low. She is under the omen of a vote of no confidence, which will not be long in coming. Since the parliamentary elections in July, after which the arduous search for a new head of government began, there has been a power vacuum in France. At the beginning of September, the former Brexit chief negotiator Michel Barnier was persuaded to take on the thankless task. The new, conservative prime minister needed two weeks to set up a government. In the meantime, he is said to have threatened the president with resignation before the team was even formed. Barnier described France's catastrophic financial situation as "very serious" and announced tax increases. For Macron, however, they are taboo. A power struggle developed between a deposed president and a powerless prime minister who does not have a majority behind him in parliament. On Thursday, 71 days after the resignation of Barnier's predecessor Gabriel Attal, the news came that a new government had been formed that Macron could live with. The next day, the Élysée Palace announced that final "adjustments" had to be made before the 38 members were officially appointed. At this point, the first names had already leaked out. Among them was that of Laurence Garnier, who sits in the Senate for the conservative Les Républicains (LR) and was slated to become Minister for the Family. Protests immediately arose against the politician, who was seen at every manif pour tous, the "demo for all" in which mainly devout Catholics took to the streets against same-sex marriage in 2012. Only a few months ago, Garnier voted no when France enshrined the right to abortion in the constitution. "This will be a government of manif pour tous," predicted Mathilde Panot, head of the radical left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI). This can be loosely translated as: a government of old white men, conservative idiots and fewer model women. "It is a minority government, with a strong weight of the conservatives of LR, who only achieved 6.5 percent in the elections and have only 46 seats in parliament. It is a clear shift to the right that breaks with Macron's original ideology," says political scientist Jérôme Jaffré in an interview with WELT AM SONNTAG. Barnier, on the other hand, congratulates himself on an "architecture of balance". That is nicely put. The truth is that the new government does not represent the election result. The surprise election produced a National Assembly made up of almost three equally strong blocs, without a clear majority. At least Macron admitted defeat A "republican front", the French version of the firewall, prevented a landslide victory for Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN), but the result did not bring the clarification Macron had called for. The president at least admitted that he had lost the election. However, he was unable to identify a winner, to the outrage of the left, whose coalition had won the most seats. The New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of the radical left-wing populists of LFI, the social democrats of the Parti Socialiste (PS), the Greens and the Communists, proposed the name of a female prime minister after laborious negotiations, which Macron rejected on the grounds that a left-wing head of government would be overthrown in no time. The same applies, however, to his right-wing head of government Barnier. At the latest stage of the negotiations, seven of the 16 ministerial posts were to go to representatives of Macron's party Ensemble pour la République (EPR) and three to the conservatives. Two posts were to go to Macron's long-standing liberal coalition partner MoDem, the party of François Bayrou, and one post to the center-right movement Horizons of former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe.