The no-confidence vote in Michel Barnier’s government highlights the failure of Emmanuel Macron’s neoliberal project. Far from reviving the liberal center, the president has pitched France into a historic political crisis.
When France’s left-wing MPs tried last week to reverse the signature reform of Emmanuel Macron’s second term — a deeply unpopular 2023 rise in the pension age — the president’s supporters organized to prevent a vote even happening. In runoffs for summer’s snap elections, left-wingers and just over half of Macron’s base had tactically voted for each other’s candidates in order to block the far right. Yet since the new parliament convened, Macron’s reduced cohort of MPs has made no sign of concessions to the largest bloc, the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance. Faced with a challenge to Macron’s pension reform, his supporters simply filibustered the bill out of existence.
Their interventions saved Macron’s plan to delay the retirement age. But just past halfway into his second term, this former poster boy of liberal centrism himself looks ready for retirement. Having lost his parliamentary majority in 2022, and fallen further in the snap elections he called in June, Macron has since September counted on a minority government uniting his MPs and the conservative Républicains, under prime minister Michel Barnier and hard-right figures like interior minister Bruno Retailleau. Even this coalition had minority support, and relied on the favor of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in refusing to join the Left in no-confidence votes. But on Wednesday, Le Pen too voted to pull the plug.
Interviewed on TV’s TF1 Info the night before the decisive vote that brought down his government, Barnier damned Le…
Auteur: David Broder
