Will Barnier clear up Macron’s mess?

Michel Barnier, 73, is the politician for all seasons in France. Emmanuel Macron has just proposed him as France’s Prime Minister.  The aim is to allow a functioning government to emerge after Marcon’s folly of dissolving the National Assembly last June. The result was like Caesar’s Gaul – French politics divided into thirds. The Left, the Right and the oddball Centre, covering Macron’s own invented party, all emerged from the National Assembly elections without a majority to govern.

None would tolerate compromise. The Left group won the biggest number of seats in the French Parliament under the banner of the New Popular Front (NPF). But this alliance against nature, headed by the Trotskyist antisemitic demagogue Jean-Luc Mélenchon, in a loose alliance with French Socialists, last in government in 2012-17 under François Hollande, plus remnants of the once-mighty  French Communist Party and protest vote Greens, is not a unitary party. All its top figures are waiting to see when the NPF will break apart, so that they can run separately in the 2027 presidential race.

The extreme Right, with slightly fewer seats than the Left, is the Le Pen family party, once called the National Front under its founder, the anti-Semite Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is now known as the National Rally under his daughter, Marine Le Pen. It has the French franchise for the 21 st century anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-European, pro-Putin new populist identity nationalist politics whicb can be seen in the US with Trump, in Italy with Melone, in Germany with the AFD, in England with Reform and the Braverman wing of the Brexit-era Tory party and variations in many countries.

In the election, Le Pen won fewer seats (but got more votes) than Mélenchon. In the middle is the Renaissance party, set up by Macron to be his personal vehicle for giving him a parliamentary majority to pass laws. A French president does defence, wars and foreign policy, but on the whole leaves domestic legislation to the National Assembly, the Prime Minister and his or her ministers.

Barnier in a long career has worked with all political tribes. He has a bust of General de Gaulle in his study and always told me he was a “social Gaullist”. He rose to fame as a local politician in his native Alpine region of Haute Savoie, when he organised the successful Winter Olympics in 1992. He was a European Commissioner for the Regions and then Foreign Minister under Chirac. I worked with him in the last period when a British government took Europe seriously.

He would offer me lifts on his ministerial jet to meetings we both had to attend. I admit that I enjoyed the high quality French cuisine the French state provides for its ministers, in contrast to the Ryanair sandwiches offered by the parsimonious Foreign Office.

We kept in touch and when he took over the Brexit negotiation portfolio for the EU, we would meet regularly in Brussels or Paris, as I reported on the Brexit state of play in London politics.

He ignored the bombast from Boris Johnson and boasts from David Frost. He gave Europe a ring-fenced deal that offered no concessions to the vanity of the Brits, who thought the EU needed the UK more than Britain needed trade and access to Europe.

Now Barnier has to see if he can find a majority for the laws that France needs passing to be governed. Marine Le Pen has promised total rejection of anything any Prime Minister other than one she nominates from her extreme right camp might propose.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon also plays the classic Trotskyist equivalent of a Leftist rejection of any laws proposed by a “bourgeois” prime minister.

Barnier will not have a majority. Thanks to Macron, who himself is without any experience of parliamentary politics, coalition formation, or working with anyone who is not a Oui-man or woman, he is embarking on something close to mission impossible.

But he is Monsieur Compromise and France’s most experienced Can-Do politician. In the end the French blockage requires a change of national leadership. The extremist Mélenchonites and centrist Socialists no more belong in the same party than did Jeremy Corbyn and Sir Keir Starmer, or Yanis Varoufakis and Greek democratic socialists.

Barnier agreeing to take the job is interesting in itself. He has not failed in any of the big jobs he has done for France. Cleaning up the Augean Stables Macron has created will be his biggest test so far.

Denis MacShane is a former Minister for Europe under Tony Blair. As well as TheArticle, he writes for French papers and appears regularly on French TV and radio.

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