The French Super-Minority Government Collapses In No-Confidence Vote; PM Will Resign

I kept seeing French news items in my X feed telling me that Emmanuel Macron did not fear a "censure" of the government, and lots of articles talking about the possibility of a "censure."

I didn't understand what the fuss was about. Who cares about a "censure"? Slap on the wrist, right?

Well, no. Apparently "censure" is the French term for a vote of no confidence in the government. Which, in a parliamentary system -- in which the government only operates when it has the confidence of the parliament -- brings the whole government down.

France has been on shaky ground since Macron called for a snap election some months ago. The National Rally, LePen's "far right" party -- and by "far right," they mean "opposes unlimited immigration from the Arab/Muslim world" -- won the most seats, but fell well short of a majority due to corrupt vote-trading whereby the "center" (really, the neoliberal left) and the far left (communists, greens) agreed to cede elections to each other and vote for each other's candidates, to deny the NR the outright majority win it was expected to take.

It worked to keep the NR under a majority. But Macron's "center" party lost a lot of seats, and could only gather a majority of parliament's support by promising all sorts of things to the far left.

Note that Macron is the President -- the head of state, as they say -- and the Prime Minister is the head of government. Macron does not need the parliament to stay in his post -- he's up for re-election in 2027, because France has five year terms, because they're stupid and gay -- but his hand-picked PM does need parliament's support.

That put this super-minority government -- my term -- at the whim of both the "far right" and the actual far left. This isn't just a minority government, it's a very weak minority government that should not be anything more than a bit-player junior partner in a government.

And the bill for the dirty election deal just came due.

French lawmakers passed a no-confidence measure against Prime Minister Michel Barnier and his cabinet on Wednesday, sending the country into a fresh spasm of political turmoil that leaves it without a clear path to a new budget and threatens to further jolt financial markets.

France's lower house of Parliament passed the measure with 331 votes, well above the majority of 288 votes that were required, after Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally joined moves by the chamber's leftist coalition to oust the government. Mr. Barnier is expected to resign soon.

It was the first successful no-confidence vote in France in over 60 years and made Mr. Barnier's three-month-old government the shortest-tenured in the history of France's Fifth Republic.

The vote comes at a difficult time for France, which is struggling with high debt and a widening deficit, challenges that have been compounded by two years of flat growth. France's strong backing for Ukraine faces a challenge with the United States' election of Donald J. Trump, and its partner in leading Europe, Germany, is weaker politically and economically than it has been in years.

President Emmanuel Macron, the nation's top leader, remains in power but support for him is shaky. His stature has been severely diminished following his surprise decision last summer to call a snap parliamentary election. His party and its allies lost many seats to the far right and the left, competing forces that bitterly oppose him.
Mr. Barnier is likely to remain as a caretaker until Mr. Macron names a new prime minister, but France faces weeks of instability, just as it did after the parliamentary vote. Mr. Macron will address the nation at 8 p.m. Thursday local time, according to the Elysée.

The Elysée is the French presidential palace.

So what comes next? I don't know.

Macron will propose a new PM, but this just leads to the same impossible position. His party is the third biggest in the French parliament, after the National Rally and the leftwing coalition, but he insists his third-ranking super-minority power should continue in power.

But as he just showed, he cannot work with the far left, and he absolutely refuses, as all other parties refuse, to work with the "far right" National Rally.

So a new PM just results in the same problem: Macron insists on remaining in control of government, yet he simply does not have enough seats to do so.

I guess he could call another snap election, but I imagine the results will be similar, with the NR taking the most seats, but blocked from taking any part in government because the rest of the parties are attempting to disenfranchise NR voters.

If I had to guess, I'd imagine France is going to go full-on extraconstitutional: They'll get some judges to agree that maybe you don't neeeeeed a majority of votes to rule. Everything will be justified by the imperative We will burn democracy down to keep Trump out of office. I mean, "keep LePen out of office," of course.

Germany's government just collapsed a few weeks ago.

Germany's economy has been shrinking for the past two years in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, war in Ukraine and competition from China. Scholz's fractious coalition failed to find a way forward on some key issues.

Lindner's Free Democrats had rejected tax increases or changes to Germany's strict self-imposed limits on running up debt. Scholz's Social Democrats and the Greens wanted to see major state investment and rejected the Free Democrats' proposals to cut welfare programs.

Donald Trump's imminent return to the White House may be creating new risks for the German economy. He has threatened to slap tariffs of up to 20% on goods from the EU, raising the prospect of a trade war with Washington's European allies.

Tariffs would deal a sharp blow to German exports and serve another painful setback to an economy that had long been powered by cheap and plentiful energy from Russia and large export markets.

German parties have the same problem France does -- they refuse to cut deals with the "far right" anti-immigration party AfD (Alternative fur Deutchland), which, as with Le Pen's NR, is growing, and so their coalitions are made up of irreconcilably-opposed parties.

Germany thinks it has a way out of this problem of voters voting for things they don't think the voters should vote for: they'll just ban the AfD, and then AfD voters will be forced to vote for one of the parties they loathe, and Germany can pretend it's a democratic party while forcing people to vote for one of several unpalatable, unpopular alternatives.

France must be considering the same option with the NR.

As David Strom notes, Macron's invitation to Trump, to visit the rebuilt Notre Dame, is a desperate strategy to find some support anywhere, even it's not from the actual French populace.

Beege Wellborne also notes that Britain is likewise teetering on political collapse, as nearly three million people have signed a petition demanding fresh elections.

Meanwhile, in America: We have Trump.

posted by Ace at 01:11 PM

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