Barnier’s fall? France has survived worse 

The BBC has excelled itself in its coverage of the French political problem – what Harold Macmillan, who knew French politics well, would have called their “little local difficulties”. The BBC has put up fluent English speaking far-Left intellectual deputies who support the gauchiste Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He, like Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, is facing accusations of anti-Semitism.

The BBC’s guest speakers, like  Mélenchon, keep saying that they won the July National Assembly elections. Melénchon’s  party, La France Insoumise , won 77 of the National Assembly’s 577 seats. The former Trotskyist was a guest of honour at the Labour Party conference in 2017, when Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters thought they were poised to win power after winning 50 seats fewer than Theresa May’s Tories.

If you add in the 66 seats won by the poorly led Socialist Party and a handful of green and communist parties, the loose Left alliance — the New Popular Front (NPF) — has a few more seats than Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.  She, however, got more votes — 37 per cent — than the four-party NPF, with 26 per cent.

So under any interpretation the claim the BBC had been promoting that the Left was victorious in the summer election in France and should thus form the government is simply untrue.

France has followed other European nations — including the Netherlands, Belgium and smaller states — in being unable to form a government after an indecisive election. The Dutch and Belgians lived for up to a year without a government. 

In France there is no obvious coalition on offer. As in the 1950s, when the biggest party in the French National Assembly was the pro-Moscow French Communist Party and governments came and went, France has reverted to type. The strong presidencies of De Gaulle and Mitterrand have given way to weak, ineffectual presidencies in the 21 st century under Sarkozy, Hollande, and now Macron.

Macron is the epitome of the Davos elite technocrat. A Rothschild banker brought into government by François Hollande in 2012, he betrayed and replaced his patron.  He believed the siren calls of the Paris elite that France did not need a down and dirty politician with years of electoral experience, but a new superman, above the old politics.

So Macron stood for election for the first time in his life when he won the presidency in 2017 and again in 2022 as his main opponent was the racist, nationalist Le Pen family enterprise, flying under different names for their political project. Le Pen, père et fille , make a splash, but so far France has not wanted to give a Le Pen supreme power.

At the same time (as Macron likes to say)  in all other elections – for the European Parliament, regional governments, town halls – Macron had little support. As a political ingénu, he thought that after Le Pen emerged as the leader of the biggest number of MEPs in the summer European Parliament elections, that by holding an early National Assembly election, France would show it was not turning fully and completely towards a racist populist government.

Le Pen’s nominee for Prime Minister, Jordan Bardella, 29, is unable to answer simple questions on economic, financial, trade, EU or foreign policy questions. Instead he simply reverts to saying that the only problem France faces is immigration and the number of Muslims in the country.

But just as Macron showed France would not vote to give Le Pen a majority of parliamentary seats, he found that he had elevated the Trotskyist, Israel-hating demagogue Jean-Luc Mélenchon to a national position.

The Socialists have five fewer seats than Mélenchon but a great deal of serious governing and political experience. They have a weak if ambitious leader, Olivier Faure, and as in the days when Labour stayed with unelectable leaders like Wilson, Kinnock, Miliband or Corbyn, the French Socialists do not have the quality of leadership to re-establish a leading position in politics.

This weekend President-elect Trump is coming to France to meet Macron in Paris. While poor Kemi Badenoch is in America hoping to get face-time with Trump, the incoming president has chosen France and Macron to begin his new era of global policy.

French productivity remains much higher than that of the UK. Paris has 8 Elizabeth lines in comparison to London’s one. French hi-speed trains criss-cross France north-south and east-west while Britain cannot manage even one that links the capital to a northern city.

France has its imperfections, but from health to high-quality trained civil servants it has a record Sir Keir Starmer would like to achieve for Britain. Unnoticed by a London media that has given up reporting on Europe, the European Union has become a much tighter, more serious outfit, coordinating effective responses to Covid and Ukraine. It has now agreed to a very tough, even draconian immigration policy.

France and Germany are both going through political turmoil. But unlike Britain under Boris Johnson or Liz Truss, France will find a technocratic prime minister who will muddle through a budget and other necessary government measures.

Macron has total control over foreign, military, security, alliance policy and handling Putin, China, Africa and Asia. There is more than enough to keep him busy until a possible new National Assembly election in the summer, though it is far from clear a new election will produce a stable majority government.

Now the focus will turn to the claimants to the Elysée. Marine Le Pen may be declared ineligible to hold public office by a court early next year, after her massive fiddling of MEP expenses to spend on national party organisation. The Socialists at some stage have to slip out from being Mélenchon’s political zimmer frame and reestablish themselves — as Labour did after Corbyn — as a serious party of national government.

France has survived far worse political crises than this one. The Fifth Republic isn’t going to collapse — no matter what the monolingual London media tell us.

Denis MacShane is the former Minister for Europe. He wrote the first biography in English of François Mitterrand in 1982. He is London correspondent of Le Journal and appears on French TV and radio. 

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