Last week, France’s left-wing parties tabled the no-confidence vote that felled conservative premier Michel Barnier. Now the Parti Socialiste threatens to break from the left-wing alliance in favor of a coalition with Emmanuel Macron and the center right.
Don’t put it past France’s Parti Socialiste (PS) to get aboard a sinking ship. Wednesday’s no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Michel Barnier over a social-security financing bill forced the collapse of a government that never had a parliamentary majority. But the vote was just as much a condemnation of the person who put him in charge: Emmanuel Macron, who handpicked Barnier in September to paper over his own camp’s defeat in the snap parliamentary elections this past summer. Once again, Macron is exposed — and at rock bottom in the eyes of the public, who hold him largely responsible for the political crisis that has gripped France since his brash dissolution of the National Assembly in June.
Yet just as the curtain falls on the veteran conservative Barnier, the Parti Socialiste shows signs of lending a hand to the president. It is mooted to join or at least provide its tacit support for a hodge-podge national unity government that would bail out Macron, who is expected to pick a new premier in the coming days. This would have the PS breaking ranks from the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), the alliance of left-wing parties that also includes France Insoumise, the Écologistes, and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) that emerged as the largest bloc in parliament in July.
The PS has been angling away from the NFP for some time. In November, PS stalwarts like former president François Hollande, elected to parliament in summer, began withdrawing support for Lucie Castets, the figure whom the left-wing parties had jointly proposed as their candidate for prime minister. In the lead-up to last week’s no-confidence vote, which the party supported, PS officials likewise raised the possibility of a “non-censure” pact with the Macronist center and Barnier’s Les Républicains. Though it would reject Barnier’s use of a special constitutional provision, known as “Article 49.3,” to force budget measures through the National Assembly without a vote, the PS was willing to come to terms with the other centrist formations and the center right over a lowest-common-denominator budget for the 2025 fiscal year.
The PS’s secretary, Olivier Faure, took those overtures to a new level late last week, claiming that his party was open to participating in a government based around “reciprocal concessions.” Before even meeting the president, the PS leader also floated the idea of trading away one of the NFP alliance’s key pledges, namely its promise to repeal Macron’s widely unpopular 2023 increase in the pension age. Instead, it wanted a “freeze” (on a law that has already come into effect) before a future “financing conference” on the retirement system. Amid the cycle of meetups at the presidential palace last Thursday and Friday, Faure, alongside Patrick Kanner, the PS caucus leader in the Senate, and Boris Vallaud, head of the party’s group in the National Assembly, began negotiations with the president.
Claiming the NFP’s “Scalp”
Faure’s maneuver fits well within the PS’s self-representation as a “party of government,” a term used to describe centrist forces of the Left and Right. It was just this self-conception that Macron pleaded to in a televised address on Thursday evening, when he blamed the fall of Barnier on the willingness of the PS (and a breakaway faction of the Républicains lead by Éric Ciotti) to join an “anti-republican front between the extreme left and extreme right.” The combination of votes between the far-right Rassemblement National and its allies and — in even greater numbers — those of the NFP provided the lion’s share of the 331 MPs that supported the no-confidence motion.
A center-left establishment figure and known opponent of the NFP who led the PS’s campaign in June’s elections to the European Parliament, of which he is a member (MEP), Raphaël Glucksmann was also quick to urge a PS rapprochement with Macron. Barnier’s defeat meant that centrist forces now had to “finally bring together and compare their policy proposals to find points of convergence,” the essayist wrote last Thursday in a Le Monde op-ed with fellow MEP Aurore Lalucq and former Macronist Aurélien Rousseau, who now caucuses with the PS in the National Assembly.
But to many of the PS’s partners, Faure’s cavalier overture to Macron looks like a willingness to scuttle the NFP alliance. Denouncing a “betrayal” by the PS, France Insoumise MEP Manon Aubry warned on Friday that Faure “was playing right into the hands of Emmanuel Macron, who wants the scalp of the NFP.” Although the Écologistes also aired a willingness to support a “non-censure” pact before the no-confidence vote, many likewise expressed their dismay with the PS leader. “To our Socialist friends: don’t go astray,” Écologistes MP Sandrine Rousseau wrote on Twitter/X on Friday morning. “We need everyone on deck to construct a left-wing alternative.”
Many in the alliance still urge that Macron grant the NFP the chance of forming a government, offering in exchange that the party would refuse passing any legislation through Article 49.3, i.e., the constitutional power deployed by Barnier that resulted in the no-confidence motion. Given that an NFP government is unlikely — despite the Left’s status as the largest bloc in parliament, with one-third of all seats — France Insoumise maintains that the only way out of the crisis of legitimacy that has unfolded since the summer is for Macron to resign. It proposes new presidential elections followed by another dissolution of parliament, though Macron dismissed talk of resignation in his Thursday speech.
Usually considered an advocate in PS ranks for engagement with left-wing unity, Faure’s nods to Macron had him going out ahead of the right-wing hard-liners in his party who oppose the NFP alliance. This is in part about jockeying before an anticipated PS congress in early 2025, which will select the next party leader and its political direction, notably the PS’s position relative to the left-wing alliance. Once the center of gravity on the French left, the PS remains divided over the electoral pact with France Insoumise and its perceived subordination to that party’s de facto leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
In the face of mounting criticism, even from within his own party, Faure retreated from his apparent willingness to break from the NFP pact. After his meeting with Macron on Friday, he tacked back to the demand that the president appoint a premier “of the Left” — a vague standard that could be said to apply to many ex-PS members of Macron’s coalition, like the former prime ministers Élisabeth Borne or Gabriel Attal. Faure likewise demanded that the president speak with the other members of the left-wing coalition.
This week, Macron will continue his schedule of meetings with the leadership of parties represented in the National Assembly, including the Écologistes and the PCF on Monday — France Insoumise, as of now, has turned down an invitation. On Wednesday, the outgoing cabinet is expected to submit the draft of a special financing law that essentially revives the 2024 budget for next year, pending another budget drive in January by a new government.
What About Le Pen?
The PS’s pleas to the Macronist center brought to the surface the deep tensions within the left-wing alliance, notably between Faure’s party and France Insoumise. Key figures in Macron’s entourage, like former premier Attal or Yaël Braun-Pivet, president of the National Assembly, are in favor of negotiations with the PS, but on the condition that it break its alliance with France Insoumise. A front-runner among possible picks for premier, veteran liberal politician François Bayrou is said to be interested in courting the PS for what he termed a “government of personalities” in his lunch with Macron last Thursday. A centrist figure like Bayrou could satisfy Faure’s red line that the party would not back a prime minister “of the Right.”
But little seems likely to reverse the political momentum pushing the centrist bloc into the arms of the far right. Throughout the fall, Barnier was attentive to Marine Le Pen’s sensitivities and demands, yielding to many of her criticisms of the budget and promising to meet the far right on its own terms on security and immigration policy. The Macronist and Républicains’ “common foundation,” as the alliance under Barnier was termed, could well double down on this approach, going even further to appease Le Pen as a budget gets cobbled together in the new year.
Tensions are especially high due to an ongoing embezzlement trial, which could see Le Pen barred from running in the next presidential election. Last month, Bayrou pointedly condemned the prosecutors’ sentencing request in that trial — a critique widely considered an olive branch to the far right. Alongside Bayrou, the Macronist defense minister Sébastien Lecornu is said to be a favorite of Alexis Kohler, Macron’s influential chief of staff; as Libération revealed in July, Lecornu entered into secret negotiations with the Rassemblement National in the lead-up to summer’s parliamentary elections. The hard-right interior minister under Barnier, Bruno Retailleau — a name also floated in recent days, although he would risk alienating elements of Macron’s party — could perhaps better win the approval of Le Pen in exchange for a new anti-immigration bill, which he supported this fall.
“I can absolutely support another no-confidence vote,” Le Pen told conservative daily Le Figaro in an interview on Friday. But it’s by no means certain that the far right will be as intransigent toward the Macronist bloc next time around. Indeed, Le Pen and her allies abstained in an earlier confidence vote in October, before finally opting to fell Barnier after having first pulled the premier along and won a raft of concessions. The move to censure last week was the subject of tensions within the far-right outfit, with internal critics reportedly fearing it jeopardized the attempt to gain the trust of centrist and establishment voters. Having flexed its muscles this time around, the Rassemblement National may want to leverage its strength for further concessions — and play it calm on the next budget.
In any case, there is likely no solution to the intractable situation in the French parliament without a fresh election being held. Yet constitutionally, a new vote to elect the National Assembly can’t take place until summer 2025. In a climate of constant elections, left-wing unity as sketched out by the NFP is surely the best way forward; divided, the parties of the alliance would suffer greatly in France’s two-round voting system. The PS’s flirtations with Macron in recent days do not augur well in that regard.