Emmanuel Macron has ruled out appointing a government led by the biggest force in parliament, the left-wing New Popular Front. His refusal confirms a case long made by the Left: it’s time to get rid of the French president’s monarchical powers.
PARIS, FRANCE – OCTOBER 18: French President Emmanuel Macron waits for Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas prior to a working lunch at the Elysee Palace on October 18, 2023 in Paris, France. (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)
It’s over two and a half months since President Emmanuel Macron called snap elections for France’s National Assembly, in the name of “political clarification.” Yet the results on July 7 brought gridlock, with Macron’s camp losing eighty-six seats, and no coalition achieving a majority. His refusal to appoint a new government since then has raised questions over the French constitutional order, as it heads into uncharted waters.
Already right after the vote, Macron’s call for an “Olympic truce” prompted doubts over whether he had truly recognized his defeat. Then, this Monday, he announced that he would not name a prime minister from the first-placed coalition, the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP). The NFP parties cried foul, insisting that their joint candidate, Lucie Castets, deserves a chance as prime minister.
Macron rejected Castets in the name of “institutional stability” — arguing that she would in any case have been no-confidenced when parliament returned in October. The NFP’s 193 seats leave it well short of a 289-seat majority in the 577-member National Assembly, and it would need others’ help to pass legislation. Yet the other blocs are in an even weaker position, with 166 seats for Macron’s camp and 142 for Marine Le Pen’s allies.
France Insoumise has fiercely denounced a Macronite “coup” against the election result. Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, had earlier offered to back a Castets government even if it had no France Insoumise ministers — a way of calling Macron’s bluff, after the president insisted that he would not let this party take office. Now, France Insoumise can say that Macron is refusing to let the Left govern at all.
France Insoumise further calls for parliament to oust Macron in the name of constitutional article 68 (“dereliction of duty”). So far, this approach has seen little take-up even among its Green, Socialist, and Communist NFP allies, though some of them have joined calls to demonstrate this September 7 to protest Macron’s move. France Insoumise is uncompromising: NFP has the right to try and enact its program.
This situation, and the wider gridlock which it expresses, shows the urgency of France Insoumise’s call for constitutional change, putting an end to the president’s quasi-monarchical powers. Talk of an antidemocratic “coup” may seem overwrought when NFP’s claim to govern is based on under one-third of the vote. But championing democratic choice may also be key to overcoming this situation — and setting new political dividing lines.
Gridlock
In reality, a minority NFP-led government would have struggled to push through major reforms, given its reliance on other MPs to back legislation. Calls for street mobilization to support its policies could not have simply overcome this problem. But such a government would have been valuable. It could have finally allowed a vote on Macron’s pension age hike (or rather, on repealing it) and tested whether Le Pen’s party would block measures like a rise in the minimum wage or caps on energy bills.
France Insoumise stands as the champion of these social policies, but also as the defender of a trampled-upon democracy. If the runoff votes on July 7 saw the left-wing electorate turn out en masse to back even Macronite and center-right candidates against Le Pen — upholding the “republican front” against the far right — the president now repays them by casting the biggest left-wing force as an illegitimate threat to France’s institutions.
The popular hearing for France Insoumise’s invective against Macron surely owes much to a certain revulsion against the president’s perceived arrogance. Yet while some commentators frame this issue in narrowly personal terms, it also reflects the overweening powers of the French presidency, and Macron’s use of them.
This was notably illustrated in the 2023 battle over his raising of the retirement age, a policy rejected by 80 percent-plus majorities in opinion polls as well as vast street mobilizations. The use of constitutional article 49.3 allowed this decisive reform to be passed without a specific parliamentary vote, by a government lacking a majority of seats.
Surely, this was a matter of the political balance of forces, rather than constitutional fixes only. Even 49.3 could have been overcome by a vote to topple the prime minister (at the time, Élisabeth Borne). At the height of the dispute in March 2023, a no-confidence vote fell nine votes short of a majority in the National Assembly.
In this summer’s snap elections, Macron’s camp took 21 percent of the vote, further weakening its position in the National Assembly. Refusing a change of course, Macron now moots a pact between his allies, the center-right Républicains, and small centrist and regionalist forces. The Républicains’ leader has ruled out such a coalition — and even if it did happen, it would be at least sixty seats short of a majority.
Still, France’s constitution — a top-heavy order formed in response to the failed colonial war in Algeria — allows the president to buy time. The current Macronite government headed by Gabriel Attal has already resigned and remains in post to handle “day-to-day business.” But this also makes it impossible for the opposition to actually remove it through a no-confidence vote. This situation has already gone on for six weeks, and has no definite end point.
Since snap elections cannot be called again until June 2025, France looks set for a technocratic fix, likely a minority coalition based on Macron’s supporters and headed by some nominally “independent” figure. Even to get through next year’s budget this fall it would have to rely on other parties, likely by leaning on them not to topple it through a no-confidence vote.
While outgoing premier Attal has proposed a baseline plan repeating this year’s spending plans unchanged in 2025, there is no real prospect of just keeping a steady hand on the tiller. France has the second-highest budget deficit among Eurozone countries (5.5 percent) and risks EU disciplinary procedures to impose cuts.
Such infraction measures are subject to political choices. Even as EU economy commissioner Paolo Gentiloni denies a “return to austerity,” we can well imagine that a left-wing French government would face more pressure from European authorities, in the name of “example-setting” than some technocratic arrangement aligned with Macron.
This also points to the limits of a (now almost purely hypothetical) NFP government. The right-wing flank of the Socialists and Greens are closer to Macron’s agenda than with the radical left, and bristle against Mélenchon’s perceived hegemony over NFP. A minority left-wing government would be highly vulnerable to such forces’ role, leveraging pressure from the Macronite camp and Brussels.
It is quite possible that even Socialist right-wingers may not now choose to tie themselves to Macron — especially given that he is now in the final phase of his presidency. But figures like former president François Hollande and his former prime minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, remain committed to defanging the Left — and in particular, resisting France Insoumise’s influence over NFP.
Vote Again, Vote Better
The positions taken by these forces have a clear eye on future elections — meaning, the 2027 presidential contest, but also fresh parliamentary elections, if France has to reelect the National Assembly in summer 2025. France Insoumise is positioning itself as the defender of the unity of the NFP, also because it knows that many in the coalition would rather break it than continue the alliance.
In June’s EU elections, where the left-wing parties stood separately, France Insoumise (10 percent) was not the biggest such force; it trailed the Parti Socialiste list headed by liberal Raphaël Glucksmann (14 percent). If this low-turnout election, with a more middle-class electorate, was always likely to favor a softer left, it also seemed to give momentum to Glucksmann’s camp — which was then rapidly undermined by the snap French election and the creation of the NFP.
Doubtless, more centrist figures elected as part of NFP would rather back a Macronite government than a robustly left-wing one. But overall, France Insoumise’s stance over the last three years — combining calls for left unity with a staunch defense of its own positions — has frustrated the often-intense efforts to marginalize it and to “Corbynize” Mélenchon as illegitimate and disreputable. France Insoumise’s relief on the night of the July 7 runoff was also a celebration of the failure of these efforts.
Did standing down in favor of Macronites in order to defeat Le Pen perhaps reflect gullibility on France Insoumise’s part? No. For years, Macron has cast this left-wing force as at least as dangerous as the far right, and there was no chance of smooth collaboration with him. It is unsurprising that he will not nominate an NFP-led government, and nor is there sufficient pressure to force him to do so. France Insoumise asserts the Left’s right to govern in order to expose Macron and to show that it is not interested in protest alone.
There can be no doubt that it faces a steeply uphill path. France Insoumise remains easily the biggest “left-populist” force in Europe, and France has not become one of those many countries where politics is reduced to a conflict between liberals and nationalists. Clearly, a major factor in this is the working-class mobilizations over living standards. But as well as forthrightly championing demands like a return to retirement at age sixty, France Insoumise has also positioned itself as the defender of republican values and an open vision of French identity.
This is also tied in with a vision of democratic change. The current gridlock, and the risk of a technocratic and even austerian government, point to the need for a different constitutional model based on greater control from below and a proportional representation of the electorate. For decades, neoliberal counterreforms have proceeded almost regardless of election results. A France Insoumise strategy for turning out abstainers also decisively focuses on this democratic deficit — insisting that it will finally channel their frustrations into political change.
If France is today on its Fifth Republic, normally the path to a new such order relies on either military defeats or coups. Today, it seems that the key tool for advancing to a Sixth Republic is, paradoxically, the presidential election itself — taking over the centralized powers of this office in order to launch a process of constitutional change. For now, France Insoumise is surely right to demand the NFP’s right to govern, and denounce Macron’s technocratic fixes.