Letter From France: ‘Build Your Own Parliamentary Majority’

There is a fun new game available on the website of Le Monde, France’s leading newspaper. It’s called “Build Your Own Parliamentary Majority,” and the game board is a blank National Assembly, with color-coded tokens corresponding to seats for the country’s 12 political parties. The goal of the game is to construct a viable parliamentary majority. There are no prizes on offer.

President Emmanuel Macron and the major political parties are currently playing the real-life version, with the prize being the seizure of political power. It is increasingly difficult to believe that anyone will manage to win.

Macron’s latest prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, formed a government that lasted all of 14 hours, a record in the history of France. It fell not because of any challenge from right or left, but because one of Macron’s parliamentary allies, Bruno Retailleau, felt that he should have been consulted about the appointment of the minister of defense, a completely empty political issue. There is no question of ideology or policy; Retailleau merely felt that he was important enough to bring the government down.

Macron gave Lecornu 48 hours to come up with an emergency solution. The talks that followed were sabotaged by the fact that the two main players in the opposition, the neofascist National Rally, vehicle of the Le Pen dynasty, and the hard-left France Unbowed party, refused to participate. So Macron now has to come up with yet another prime minister: No. 8 for his presidency. 

The chief obstacle to political agreement, one that has brought down several governments already, is the fiery issue of pension reform.

French pensioners enjoy the fattest rewards of anyone outside anomalous and fabulously wealthy statelets like Monaco or Bahrain. This applies in particular to state employees, for whom the French system works like social democracy is supposed to work: long holidays, short working weeks, free health care and education, and pensions linked to the highest salary they reached during their working life. For Macron, a Citibank kind of guy, the expanding French national debt means that general impoverishment is in the offing, and the only way to stop it is to reform the system that pays for the luxury holidays of retired bureaucrats. He announced a reform plan in 2023; but his attempts to change the system bring thousands on to the streets, and their outrage is real in a France where the rich continue to get richer and politicians seem to be stuck in a permanent shouting match.

Lecornu felt that the question of pension reform was so divisive that it was best to suspend the whole question until after the next presidential elections, buying Macron time during his final term. But this puts attention back on the uncomfortable political question, which cannot be delayed, and which has dominated French politics for 20 years: How will the ascendant neofascist far-right handle the collapse of Macron’s program?

France — like Italy, Spain, Portugal and nearly the whole of Latin Europe — was an openly fascist country in the 1930s, and its peculiar brand of Catholic fascism has never really gone away. Since the Second World War, it has seemed that a balance of power between a social-democratic left and a pro-business and nationalist right, however hypocritical and corrupt, was enough to keep the ship of state on an even keel. But that arrangement has gradually slipped away, leaving nothing but presidential personality politics opposed by regional political dynasties and bosses who increasingly try to ignore Paris. Jacques Chirac was the last proper French president, and his successors have had mixed results, to put it politely. There is currently no clear political debate in France. For all its faults, America’s frame of Republicans versus Democrats is at least comprehensible. The 12 parties in the Le Monde computer game defeat even the French, and every roll of the dice just makes the game more impossible.

The Ecologists say that the only solution is an Ecologist prime minister. Lecornu suggests a nonpolitical figure, pointing out that, according to the constitution, Macron can appoint anyone he likes. But this seems very unlikely. The youth, meanwhile, are divided. Like Generation Z everywhere, they are faced with no careers, no houses, no future. Some go for the leftist coalition with its old-fashioned message of Up the Workers and its power base of industrial trade unions, but more and more are going for whatever plays on TikTok. And nobody does TikTok better in France than the neofascists.

Across the spectrum is the sneaking suspicion that the government is not as important as it pretends. Belgium has shown that failure to form a government does not prohibit the country from functioning, and people suspect that France will continue on, whatever happens. And despite all the noise from politicians around immigration and unemployment, the French have become so cynical about political leaders that they are not surprised when the system keeps failing. The only issue that truly animates them now is protecting their 20 or 30 years of retirement. Whether they can do so in the face of what Macron’s last prime minister, François Bayrou, called “reality” in his resignation speech is another question.