Marine Le Pen won the French elections after all. The new government of Michel Barnier has no working majority in parliament. It survives on her say-so, one bill at a time, until she is ready to dispose of it.
Her National Rally has vetoed key ministers. It has pulled the machinery of the French state sharply to the Right, to the point where the country has acquired an interior minister and “top cop” with intellectual views on immigration that sound similar to those of Enoch Powell.
The government is “under the surveillance” of Le Pen’s 11m voters. Such is the twisted outcome of an election that was manipulated in a giant circus of self-interested moral humbug to “save the republic” from the far Right, though in reality to save Emmanuel Macron and his allies from an even larger defeat. The National Rally nevertheless won a greater share of the vote than Britain’s Labour Party and is now the big beast of French politics, so you could call it poetic justice.
Le Pen can extend this coalition enough rope to hang itself, feigning responsible opposition while Mr Barnier’s ministers are left with full ownership of the coming austerity. There is no avoiding it. France has the worst structural deficit in the eurozone, no longer masked by Covid or stratospheric gas costs. It is a story of chronic overspending on every front.
Needless to say, Mr Macron never delivered the promised cull of 120,000 state jobs.
“Yes, the situation of our public finances is serious, I won’t beat about the bush: in 2024, the deficit risks blowing through 6pc of GDP,” said the incoming budget minister.
The alleged black hole discovered by Rachel Reeves is a pothole compared to this. President Macron, “the Mozart of finance”, has left France with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 111pc of GDP, higher today than the ratios of Spain or Portugal, and closing in on Italy.
This loose fiscal policy is no longer buying short-term growth or flattering French growth. S&P Global’s survey of services and manufacturing crashed through the boom-bust line in September, signalling recession risk. “The year seems lost for French factories. Output is shrinking at the fastest pace since the beginning of the year, and new orders continue to decline,” said the group.
To be clear, France does not face a funding crisis. Nor does Britain today, and nor did it during the Liz Truss episode. One should not confuse burst pipes in the plumbing of the financial plumbing with fundamental insolvency.
France remains a formidable economic power with layers of strategic depth. But it no longer enjoys the unique licence of French exceptionalism in Europe’s monetary union. The risk spread over 10-year German bonds is hovering near 0.8 percentage points. It has not come down since France descended into political chaos in June. Portugal can borrow for significantly less on the global capital markets. That would have been unthinkable just five years ago.
However, the even larger threat to France’s prospects lies in the damage done to political cohesion. President Macron has carpet-bombed French democracy for seven years. He systematically set about annihilating the moderate Left and the moderate Right, for his own glorification in the imperial centre. In this he succeeded long enough to shatter the foundations of the Fifth Republic, designed to promote alternating government.
He refused to share power after losing his majority in 2022 and governed thereafter by the decree powers of Article 49.3, ramming through a botched pension reform against vehement opposition from parliament and from three-quarters of the French people.
He embodies an entrenched political elite that brooks to its hegemony. It arrogates the right to uphold the “values of the republic” – as it defines them – and from that presumption thinks itself justified in proscribing a genuine policy of national sovereignty by the Right or a genuine policy of radical economic and social change by the Left.
The European project helps greatly in this regard because it too prohibits both heresies through the mechanism of the Acquis and the rules of euro membership.
The National Rally and Jean-Luc Melenchon’s France Unbound both utter much nonsense, but neither has yet done anything that adds up to a threat to the constitutional order of France, unless you count the sins of euroscepticism or socialism. But here we confuse “values” with what are really “interests”.
Michel Houellebecq, France’s best-known novelist, says that this incumbent caste is harder to overthrow than the hereditary nobility of the Ancien Regime. It is more certain of its righteousness, by virtue of higher education and attainment.
He says the rot set in after the French people voted no to the European constitution in the 2005 referendum, only to see a near identical text slipped through as the Lisbon Treaty. I agree that this was a watershed event for both France and Europe, the moment when the EU project showed its character.
Whatever you think about Brexit, it was a powerful affirmation of democracy. The political, economic, judicial, and media elites were unable to reverse the rebel vote or derail its consequences.
“Houellebecq is right. This high administrative elite has taken over France, like a plague,” said Professor Brigitte Granville, a French economist at Queen Mary University of London and author of What Ails France?.
“They all go to the same schools and then to ‘Sciences Po’. Those who fail go into journalism, and the clever ones go on to ENA [École Nationale d’Administration]. But they all inter-married and form a tight-knit group of 6,000 people,” she said.
They have become the new aristocracy of an elected monarchy, she said, but with a greater sense of their own infallible superiority, and without the softening qualities of noblesse oblige.
Mr Macron, who wrote his student thesis on Machiavelli, learned the methods of his master, but not the skills. He was happy to team up with France Unbound in an electoral pact when it was useful, ordering his own candidates to make way for neo-Marxists in chosen districts. But he then refused to let the victorious Front Populaire try to form a Left-wing government, on the grounds that it included the same Melenchonistes.
This was a howler. The Front Populaire would have faced a no-confidence vote within 48 hours. The proper etiquette would have been observed. Instead, he played into the hands of the Left, letting them promote a black legend that victory was stolen.
Mr Macron is left clinging onto the illusion of substantive power with an emasculated rump that has no governing legitimacy. His twin cordon sanitaires of the Left and Right have disqualified groups that won 61pc of the popular vote, and paralysed the functioning of the Fifth Republic. This state of affairs cannot endure. “The question is when the anger reaches a level that they can’t control any more,” said Prof Granville.
The well-meaning Michel Barnier – one of the great gentlemen of European politics, though not the brightest – may limp on for a while. But the dam will break sooner or later. When it does, the ENA elites will be taken to the political guillotine.
France is an admirable country but if there were such a thing as a political rating agency, it would surely be cutting France down to the BBBs by now. Mr Macron has made an utter hash of democratic government.
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