Emmanuel Macron arrived in Saudi Arabia on Monday for trade talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Having signed a strategic partnership deal in Riyadh, the pair pledged to work for peace in the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon.
An Élysée spokesman said Macron wants ‘presidential elections to be held in Lebanon, with the aim of bringing the Lebanese together and carrying out the reforms necessary for the country’s stability and security.’
No one wants to be seen trying to save Emmanuel Macron
The irony won’t have been lost on the French. A recent poll revealed that nearly two-thirds of the country think their president should resign in the event that his government, under the leadership of Michel Barnier, receives a vote of no confidence in response to their proposed budget.
That vote will take place on Wednesday, almost certainly bringing to an end Barnier’s short-lived premiership and making his 90-day tenure the shortest in the history of the Fifth Republic. The previous record was held by the Socialist, Bernard Cazeneuve who managed 155 days during the presidency of Francois Hollande.
It may be an idea if President Macron stopped worrying about the ‘stability and security’ of the Middle East and hurried home to try and sort out the chaos he unleashed on France when he called a snap election in June.
Monday was a day of high drama in Paris with the political class waiting to see if Marine Le Pen was just bluffing when at the end of last week she threatened to join the left in a no confidence vote.
It turned out she wasn’t. Barnier tried to talk her out of it, according to the French media, calling the leader of the National Rally on Monday morning to tell her that he was ready to make concessions on the budget as she had demanded. He committed to not cutting reimbursements for medicines, and on the question of abolishing State Medical Aid – a magnet for immigrants, according to Le Pen – he said he had ‘made a start on that’.
Le Pen reportedly told Barnier she would discuss her next move with her party president, Jordan Bardella, and get back to him after lunch.
When she called Barnier it was to tell him that she will support the left on Wednesday when they table the vote of no confidence in his government. ‘She made him dance’, is the headline in one tabloid this morning, and it does appear that Le Pen enjoyed humiliating Barnier.
He deserved to have been treated with more respect. He has his faults as a statesman – notably his devotion to the EU project – but he is an honourable man who had the courage to accept the challenge of trying to save France from becoming a Banana Republic. ‘It’s hard to think of a worse job,’ I wrote in September. Barnier probably agrees this morning.
So what next for France? This is the question dominating the print and broadcast media in France this morning with numerous scenarios being discussed.
There is a slim chance that the vote of no confidence tomorrow could fail if, in the next 24 hours, Barnier manages to persuade one party to support him. That would most likely be the centre-left Socialists, who are part of the left-wing New Popular Front coalition.
In an interview on Tuesday morning the leader of the Socialists, Olivier Faure, rebuked Barnier for not reaching out to his party in formulating his budget, perhaps a hint that it’s not too late.
Such a scenario is unlikely, however, because no one wants to be seen trying to save Emmanuel Macron. Ultimately, the aim of the Socialists and their left-wing allies – the Greens and Jean-Luc Melenchon’s la France Insoumise – is the same as Le Pen’s: to force Macron to resign.
On Monday evening, Melenchon called on Macron to do just that, but such a scenario is ‘unthinkable’, according to one of the president’s MPs this morning.
Instead, Macron might do what he did after July’s inconclusive parliamentary elections and play for time by delaying the nomination of a successor to Barnier until the new year. In the summer he used the Paris Olympics as a ‘truce’, and with Christmas coming up there is another convenient excuse for procrastination.
On the other hand, Le Monde claims that Macron is already drawing up a list of successors and will narrow it down on his flight home from Saudi Arabia tomorrow.
How long will the next PM last? Probably not long given the divisions within the National Assembly. And with new elections not possible before July 8 next year (the Constitution precludes two elections within 12 months) the democratic process is well and truly stuck.
There have been suggestions that consequently Macron could invoke Article 16 of the Constitution, which permits a president in times of crisis to govern without the backing of the National Assembly. In other words, as one newspaper put it, turn France into a ‘dictatorship’.
Such a power grab, however, would run the risk of provoking a backlash from the people. With the country going through a cost-of-living crisis, and with a wave of redundancies expected in 2025, there is a dangerous febrility to France as this most turbulent of years draws to an end.
Macron should think carefully before his next step, or else he and France might have a nasty fall.