Emmanuel Macron has appointed Michel Barnier as France’s prime minister, after securing Marine Le Pen’s agreement. The creation of a government reliant on her blessing is another step in the far right’s march toward power.
Michel Barnier during a speech at the Hotel Matignon in Paris, France, on September 5, 2024. (Nathan Laine / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
As results poured in from the first round of France’s elections on June 30, veteran Gaullist politician Michel Barnier sounded the alarm. His Les Républicains seemed faced for a debacle, with under 7 percent of the vote. Ahead of the election, the party had suffered a damaging split, as a noisy minority made an alliance with Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN). Barnier opposed their position — but likewise warned against the left-wing danger to the Republic.
In the second round, he insisted, it was necessary “to build a barrage against both LFI [Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing France Insoumise] and the RN.” This contravened the established idea of a “republican front” uniting democrats against the far right. Yet in dozens of constituencies, the runoffs on July 7 offered a straight contest between France Insoumise and Le Pen’s RN. In those races, Les Républicains’ voters split in favor of the far-right option, by an estimated 38 to 26 percent. No longer considering it a pariah, they backed it even against the more center-left Greens and Socialists.
These Les Républicains voters were too few to give Le Pen a majority. Most left-wingers (and just over half of centrists) voted tactically to block her party, and surprised expectations that it was coasting toward power. Ultimately, the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire scored 192 seats, Emmanuel Macron’s camp 166, and Le Pen’s allies only 142, in a deeply divided parliament. Yet the president soon gave the far right the initiative again — handing it a kingmaker role that culminated this Thursday in Barnier’s appointment as prime minister.
While the president last week ruled out a government led by the left-wing alliance, his consultations with Le Pen in effect sought her approval before a new broad-right administration could form. Le Pen threatened “no-confidence” votes on potential candidates who might make deals with the center-left, or even a right-winger hated by her party like Xavier Bertrand. But she told Macron that she would not immediately no-confidence a Barnier government, instead publicly demanding that it should “respect” her RN’s agenda and its over ten million voters.
When Macron called this snap vote in June, despite his party’s dismal poll scores, it seemed that he was finding a way to ease the far right into governmental responsibility, even under his presidency. With the Rassemblement National easily topping preelection polls, its victory appeared to be the most likely outcome. The second-round results on July 7, seemed to subvert such prognoses. Yet ultimately, they were right all along. Barnier, from France’s fourth-largest political bloc, is now to be premier, both allied to Macronites and dependent on Le Pen’s favor.
The Left is denouncing a betrayal of the Nouveau Front Populaire’s electoral success. For Mélenchon, the president is “denying the result of the election that he himself called.” France Insoumise’s leader in the European Parliament, Manon Aubry, likewise said that the “results from the ballot box have been erased” and spoke of “Barnier [being] appointed prime minister with the far right’s blessing.” While some on the most centrist wing of the Socialist Party may have favored a broad government spanning center-left and center-right, in the main the parties in this left-wing alliance claimed that the July 7 result expressed a popular demand for a turn to the Left.
The creation of a government reliant on Le Pen’s blessing is another stage in the “mainstreaming” of her party by elites who once promised to fight it. But there is a deeper logic to Macron’s choice. Barnier has been picked in order to pass a budget — a difficult task given not only France’s fragmented parliament but also the European disciplinary procedures looming over a country with the EU’s biggest debt (in absolute terms) and a 5.5 percent deficit. Even beyond his record as an EU institutional figure able to curry favor in Brussels, Barnier surely does have a greater chance than the Left to form an ad hoc majority for his spending plans, perhaps reliant on the abstention of RN parliamentarians who themselves promise sobriety in the public accounts.
Some of Barnier’s hard-right positions, trumpeted in his Les Républicains primary bid ahead of the 2022 presidential election, are amenable to convergences with the Le Pen camp. In that contest, he aired the idea of a three-to-five-year moratorium on migration to the EU, the return of military service, and army patrols in communities where the police are said to have lost control. In response to his appointment, Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal — in general a more hard-line anti-immigration radical — called on the new prime minister to live up to these past promises. In that campaign, Barnier like most other Les Républicains candidates also favored raising the pension age to sixty-five.
In choosing to “not no-confidence” Barnier, Le Pen seeks to put on a display of institutional responsibility. An albeit limited comparison could be made with Giorgia Meloni’s approach toward the Italian “national unity” government led by former central banker Mario Draghi in 2021–22, where she insisted that she would adopt a “constructive” rather than “party-political” approach, and in general avoided harsh criticism of the technocrat. Such a rhetorical position allowed Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia to rake in voters from other parties dissatisfied with the government (the other main right-wing forces had joined Draghi’s coalition) while also posturing as serious and ready for high office.
But the differences also matter. Unlike in that Italian case, the French far right has to contend with a considerable left-wing opposition, which will be sure to highlight its complicity with anti-social, budget-cutting policies. This especially matters since this government arrives not in a period of fiscal stimulus but of looming austerity, as EU authorities shut off the taps of post-pandemic spending. Judging by the recent election campaign, the RN will likely navigate this by adopting a two-faced position: demanding a budget rebate from the EU, accepting that big spending plans like a reduction of the pension age must be “delayed for now,” and calling for cuts to target the categories it most demonizes.
In any case, we can be sure that this arrangement has a short shelf life, and that Le Pen will not be tying herself into this position for the whole period up to the 2027 presidential election. This is a stopgap government, well short of a majority in the National Assembly and quite possibly destined to end with fresh elections in ten months’ time. It may be that Le Pen has boxed herself into a corner and that parts of her base will demand a more intransigent opposition to Barnier. But likely far more will see the Rassemblement National exerting increasing influence over France’s government, and breaking down the previous dams against it.