French Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s short-lived government is one miracle away from total collapse as soon as Wednesday. Having been appointed by French President Emmanuel Macron in September in the belief that he was the one man who could survive a vote of no confidence in France’s deeply divided National Assembly, the right-wing premier is now staring down a twofold threat – from the left-wing New Popular Front alliance, on the one hand, and the far-right National Rally (RN) party, upon which his fragile minority government depends. Both groups submitted no-confidence motions on Monday, and the RN said it will back any vote to topple the government.
The vote would be a response to the prime minister’s decision to use Article 49.3 of the constitution – sometimes known in France as the “nuclear option” – to push his government’s sweeping social security budget bill through parliament without a vote.
The article has been used in the past, most recently in 2023 to push through Macron’s deeply unpopular reforms raising the retirement age. But using it can trigger a no-confidence vote in parliament, where a simple majority is enough to topple a government. In a parliament split between three roughly equal blocs, left and far right together have more than enough votes to bring Barnier down.
What happens now?
What happens next is far from clear. Having already called snap parliamentary elections in June, Macron cannot legally dissolve the National Assembly again until June 2025. Barnier justified his austerity budget, which ostensibly would raise €20 billion through tax hikes while cutting €40 billion in government spending, with the urgent need to reduce the country’s deficit. Instead, he is setting the country up to start the new year with no budget at all.
Marta Lorimer, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, said the collapse of the Barnier government – along with all its budget proposals – would push the country into unfamiliar territory.
“What is at stake is France’s financial stability,” she said. “If the government falls, France is effectively going into the new year without a budget and no clear majority to pass one. Although it will be possible to extend the 2024 budget to avoid a government shutdown, this does mean that no new measures can be introduced, be it cuts or expenditures, and it is unclear how – or when – a new budget could be passed.”
Read moreThere goes France? Le Pen and left set to topple Barnier government
Giovanni Capoccia, professor of comparative politics at the University of Oxford’s department of politics and international relations, said that even rolling the 2024 budget into 2025 would take a parliamentary vote – and that it would not it be a lasting solution to France’s political deadlock.
“The budget of this current year will not work as a budget for future years, if for no other reason than inflation,” he said. “There’s a thousand other things that change in the budget. So this cannot be taken as a solution – just as a placeholder for a solution.”
Should even that emergency measure fail to pass, he said, France would quickly find itself running up against the limits of precedent.
“Even that law can be rejected, at which stage we will be in completely uncharted territory,” he said. “The only solution there is that the government passes the budget by ordinance – the constitution allows them to do that, but this is a government that will have resigned. So they’ll probably do it, but it’s not clear at all whether this is something that is acceptable.”
As a final measure, Capoccia said, there was always Article 16 of the constitution, which allows the president to take “all measures” that circumstances require in times of national crisis.
“Beyond which there are only the exceptional powers, the state of emergency – De Gaulle in ’61,” he said, referring to then president Charles de Gaulle’s invoking of emergency powers in the face of an attempted military putsch. “So it’s not exactly something that happens every day. Each of these scenarios spells out a higher level of instability and unpredictability that obviously will then impact on investments and on borrowing.”
What went wrong?
Although France’s left-wing New Popular Front has consistently opposed Barnier since he was appointed as prime minister in September, the RN’s decision to bring down a government that had been utterly dependent on the far-right party’s support has been more surprising.
The RN has for years tried to position itself in the eyes of a wary public as a responsible party ready to take the reins of government, distancing itself from both its own tainted, anti-Semitic history and from the more strident displays of political opposition that the left has favoured in recent years.
More concretely, the RN has held the fate of Barnier’s government in its hands from the beginning, extracting grudging concessions even in the final hours before he announced his decision to invoke Article 49.3.
Barnier had already backed down on a number of “red lines” set by the party in the days leading up to the vote, including scrapping a proposed tax hike on electricity and a plan to reduce drug reimbursements.
Watch moreArticle 49.3: The French government’s special constitutional power
Lorimer said the RN had likely considered the political cost of backing Barnier’s austerity measures as being too high a price to pay.
“So far, they have pushed the ‘respectabilisation’ card strongly. However, they realise that they risk losing support if they are perceived as being too close to Barnier’s positions,” she said. “In my view, they have made the calculation that it is riskier to be seen as propping up an unpopular government than it is to ‘call it a day’ on it – and claim that this justifies the request for an early presidential election.”
For his part, Capoccia said the calculus may have been a good deal simpler. With far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen facing a possible five-year ban on political activity on accusations of having embezzled millions of euros in EU funds, the RN may have decided that an abrupt show of force was needed.
“My impression is that this is really a double-or-nothing strategy,” he said. Presenting the party “as a stabilising force, a reliable force that can form government tomorrow, only lasts until the power of Marine Le Pen herself is put into question”.
“Essentially the Rassemblement National is a party that cannot do without its leader.”
Ultimately, Lorimer said, the RN seemed to have become caught in its own contradictions – mobilised by a radical desire to break from the political order of the day, while faced with the urgent need to expand its support among middle-class conservatives potentially reluctant to see the country descend into political chaos.
“The RN has been struggling with the fact that it needs to do two things at the same time,” she said. “On one side, it needs to moderate its message and appear more respectable to widen its appeal. On the other, it cannot risk losing the support of its more radical core of voters.”
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