In the French style: Macron's hunt for a PM
In theory the President can appoint anyone he likes; in practice, finding someone the National Assembly will tolerate is proving extremely difficult
Introduction
Critics of the Westminster system of government often look enviously at other systems in which ministers can be appointed from outside the legislature, which in theory allows for “experts” to be given executive power. They point particularly to examples like Nobel laureate Steven Chu, currently William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Physics, of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, and of Energy Science and Engineering at Stanford University, who served as United States Secretary of Energy from 2009 to 2013; or Dominique de Villepin, Foreign Minister of France from 2002 to 2004, who had been a senior diplomat, including as senior adviser on Africa at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; or even the current United States Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin III, an officer in the US Army from 1975 to 2016 who ended his military career as commander of United States Central Command (his predecessor was General James Mattis of the US Marine Corps, who also served a Secretary of Defense 2017-19).
The premiership of France
Some of this flexibility attaches to the office of Prime Minister of France, a post President Emmanuel Macron is currently and increasingly frantically trying to fill (as I explained a few days ago in The Hill). Social media has seen a surprising number of sudden experts on French politics, some of whom are labouring under various misconceptions, so it is worth examining the premiership from an institutional point of view for a moment.
The Prime Minister (Premier ministre) is France’s head of government, and he or she leads the Council of Ministers (Conseil des ministres), the main executive body which meets every Wednesday morning and is analogous to the cabinet in the United Kingdom. The meetings themselves are, however, chaired by the President of the Republic and take place at his official residence, the Élysée Palace.
Under the provisions of the Constitution of France, which came into effect in October 1958 at the beginning of the Fifth Republic, “The President of the Republic shall appoint the Prime Minister” and “on the recommendation of the Prime Minister, he shall appoint the other members of the Government and terminate their appointments” (Article 8). However, the President cannot remove the Prime Minister on his own initiative, though he “shall terminate the appointment of the Prime Minister when the latter tenders the resignation of the Government”. The government can only be forced from office by a motion of no confidence in the National Assembly (Assemblée nationale).
Macron’s search for a government
Whom should the President choose? In theory, he may appoint anyone he likes, though Article 23 of the Constitution imposes these restrictions on ministers:
Membership of the Government shall be incompatible with the holding of any Parliamentary office, any position of professional representation at national level, any public employment or any professional activity.
Therefore, if the President chooses a member of the National Assembly to be Prime Minister, as often happens, that person must step down from the legislature. There is a stricture in the opposite direction too, in that the National Assembly’s power to remove a government—and therefore a prime minister—by a motion of no confidence effectively gives the assembly a veto on the premiership. There is no formal confirmation, as happens, for example, for the First Minister in the Scottish Parliament, but the procedural logic is that the Prime Minister must at least be a candidate who is acceptable to a majority in the National Assembly.
Ignoring this basic political reality has led many on the left in France, and beyond, to misinterpret the current situation and mount their high horses. The result of the recent elections for the National Assembly were inconclusive to a degree unprecedented in the Fifth Republic. There are 577 deputies, who are aligned as follows:
The largest group, with 180 deputies, is the hastily assembled New Popular Front (Nouveau Front populaire), a broad left-wing alliance of new fewer than 55 parties of which the largest are La France Insoumise (“France Unbowed”), the Socialist Party (Parti socialiste), the Left Party (Parti de gauche) and the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français).
Second, with 159 deputies, is Ensemble (“Together”), a centrist coalition of eight parties dominated by Renaissance, which was founded in 2016 by Emmanuel Macron as En Marche! as a platform for his presidential campaign.
The third largest group in the assembly, mustering 142 deputies, is the right-wing populist National Rally (Rassemblement national) and a group designated by the Ministry of the Interior as the Union of the Far-Right (Union de l'extrême droite); these latter deputies are members of the centre-right Republicans (Les Républicains) whose candidacies were endorsed by the National Rally.
No other political group has more than 100 deputies, but the problem is obvious. The New Popular Front, having gathered the largest number of seats, claims to have “won” the election and therefore the right to nominate a candidate for prime minister; it has proposed Lucie Castets, a virtually unknown economist who is currently Director of Finance and Purchasing for the Mayor of Paris. Macron has refused to appoint anyone proposed by the NPF, which left-wingers claim amounts to a “democratic coup”, but the reality is that theEnsemble and the National Rally will not support Castets or any other candidate from the left, so for the President to appoint her would simply be to start a chain of events which would quickly lead to a motion of no confidence by the National Assembly, after which the whole process would have to start again.
To reiterate the point, the NPF has no constitutional “right” to nominate a prime minister, as the choice lies solely with the President, and with only 180 deputies out of 577 the group simply does not have the parliamentary strength to sustain a government in office without support from other parties. Its lack of cross-party appeal was underlined after the elections when Yaël Braun-Pivet of Renaissance was re-elected as President of the National Assembly with 220 votes, beating Andre Chassaigne of the French Communist Party, part of the NPF, with 207 votes and Sébastien Chenu of the National Rally (141).
The toxin in the NPF, as far as the President and many of the other parties in the National Assembly are concerned, is La France Insoumise, which, with 71 deputies, is 40 per cent of the group. It was founded in 2016 by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Socialist who broke away to found the Left Party in 2008 and was its presidential candidate in 2012: he finished fourth in the first round with 11 per cent of the vote. In 2016, by then a Member of the European Parliament, Mélenchon founded La France Insoumise on the premise that the traditional party structures were no longer sufficient and instead transverse political movements were needed.
LFI has been described as left-wing and far-left: it is a democratic socialist party which rejects free trade agreements and neoliberalism in general, wants a radical energy transition including the closure of all nuclear power plants, demands a “democratic re-founding” of the European Union failing which it supports France’s withdrawal, supports a substantial redistribution of wealth, would withdraw from NATO and seeks a shorter working week, a higher minimum age and a lower retirement age. Mélenchon himself has been dogged by accusations of antisemitism, rejecting the idea that France bears any responsibility for the Holocaust, claiming that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was the victim of coordinated smears by Jewish interest groups linked to Likud and using the analogy of Christ being killed by “his own people” when talking about police reform.
There are, however, various incompatibilities which have emerged in the two months since the legislative elections. In short: Macron and a number of Renaissance deputies will not support any coalition which includes LFI; LFI has ruled out a coalition with Ensemble (and vice-versa); the Ecologists (Les Écologistes), part of the NPF, will not support a prime minister aligned with President Macron; the Republicans oppose a left-wing coalition and a formal agreement with a pro-Macron government but might agree to a “legislative pact” with the latter; and the National Rally will vote against any minority NPF government or one which contains members of LFI or the Ecologists.
This is terra incognita for the current constitutional arrangements. At the moment, the Prime Minister is the 35-year-old Gabriel Attal of Macron’s Renaissance party, who was appointed in January 2024 to replace Élisabeth Borne after a ministerial career of barely 18 months. He offered his resignation to the President on 8 July, after the elections to the National Assembly, but was refused; a week later, Macron formally accepted Attal’s resignation on the condition that he remain in office as a caretaker until a new premier could be found. He remains there, the longest serving caretaker prime minister of the Fifth Republic.
Prime ministers have tended to be drawn from the party of group which supports the President of the Republic, as was the case from 1958 to 1986, 1988 to 1993, 1995 to 1997 and, broadly speaking, since 2002. When the composition of the National Assembly requires the President to choose a prime minister from a party which opposes his own, it is known as cohabitation, a situation which François Mitterand (1981-95) had to endure twice and Jacques Chirac (1995-2007) once. It is a rarity, but even on those occasions, there was an obvious majority in the National Assembly on which the President could rely to sustain his (reluctantly) chosen Prime Minister in office.
Now the assembly is more or less split three ways, and no group can automatically call on the 289 votes needed for a majority; indeed, none of the three major groups is anywhere near that. The NPF’s insistence that it should be allowed to nominate a prime minister, and the equal vehemence from Ensemble and the National Rally that they will not support a candidate of the NPF, has in theory given Macron the initiative. He can now look around the political scene, and indeed beyond it, to find a potential prime minister who might be able to knit together a coalition of enough votes to survive in the National Assembly at least for a little while. There are suspicions that the President might dissolve the assembly again next summer, but at least a year must elapse between one dissolution and another, so that cannot happen until 9 June 2025 at the earliest.
Potential candidates from left, right and centre
The prospect of Lucie Castets becoming Prime Minister seems to be dead. You could be forgiven for wondering how seriously she was proposed in the first place, given her virtually non-existent public profile and lack of national experience, and there is a suspicion that the NPF put forward a deliberately surprising candidate in the certainty that she would be dismissed by President Macron (which is exactly what happened).
Until Monday (2 September), the front runner seemed to be Bernard Cazeneuve, a former Socialist who was briefly Prime Minister (2016-17) under President François Hollande. A 61-year-old lawyer, he left the Socialist Party in 2022 in protest at its agreeing an electoral pact with LFI and last year launched a social democratic movement called The Convention. Cazeneuve is well respected across the political spectrum, especially for his tenure as Minister of the Interior during the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, but LFI vowed to oppose his nomination. However, he was not enthusiastic about returning to government, telling Macron when first approached in August only that he was prepared to “do his duty”. Politico reports that Cazeneuve is no longer in contention.
A technocratic option for President Macron has emerged in the person of Thierry Beaudet, currently President of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council which advises government and parliament and promotes dialogue. Originally a teacher in Normandy, Beaudet has no political experience and was previously chairman of the Fédération Nationale de la Mutualité Française, an organisation of mutual health insurance organisations. However, Macron’s allies in the National Assembly are sceptical about Beaudet, suggesting that the appointment of a technocrat would look like denying that the elections had even taken place and doubting that he would have the political skills to survive for any length of time.
The most likely candidate at the moment, insofar as that means anything, is Xavier Bertrand, who held several ministerial portfolios under Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, and was Secretary General of the right-wing, Gaullist Union for a Popular Movement (the predecessor of the Republicans) but left the party in 2017 when Laurent Wauquiez was elected leader. Since 2016 Bertrand has been President of the Regional Council of Hauts-de-France, the third most populous region which covers Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Picardy and is based in Lille. (The regions, of which there are 18 including five covering France’s overseas territories, have control over secondary education and some infrastructure, as well as assistance to business.) As a centre-right candidate, Bertrand is more amenable to the President, but the National Rally has announced that it would vote against him if appointed. That would leave Bertrand reliant on Macron’s Ensemble coalition, the 49 deputies of the Republican Right, independent and dissident centre-right deputies and perhaps some of the more centrist members of the NPF, which seems a shaky basis for a government.
It is, essentially, much easier to see reasons why any of the three candidates Macron has considered would fail as Prime Minister than why they would succeed. The composition of the National Assembly means that none of the main groups can impose a candidate on the President, but, while they also cannot exercise an automatic veto, they could make the construction of a plausible parliamentary coalition extremely challenging. If Bertrand does emerge as premier, facing the outright opposition of the National Rally and the presumed hostility of the broad majority of the NPF, his path forward seems very narrow and precarious.
Why is French politics not offering better candidates?
I come back to the idea with which I started, the supposed “freedom” of non-Westminster systems to make use of talent from within the political community and beyond it. In principle, that is appealing, of course. Yet, until a few weeks ago, this year’s US presidential election was a contest between two elderly men born in the 1940s, and a poll in January suggested that two-thirds of the electorate would prefer neither candidate was running. A country of 335 million people had somehow narrowed the choice for the nation’s chief executive to two options, each of which was hugely compromised and controversial. (Before the last presidential election in 2020, I wrote for Worth that an executive search team which came back with candidates like Trump and Biden for a major C-suite position would be given short shrift.)
President Macron seems to be in a similar position. France, with a population of nearly 70 million, may be on the fifth iteration of its republican constitution, but it is a mature and relatively stable democracy with thriving local and regional powerbases. Yet the shortlist to be Prime Minister at this challenging and difficult time seems to have been reduced to a former Socialist who held the post for six months under the previous president, a one-time Gaullist minister who now oversees regional government in northern France and an unknown economic adviser with no political experience. Cazeneuve is 61, Beaudet is 62 and Bertrand 59.
Is this the best that French politics can offer? It is worth observing, perhaps, that, including Cazeneuve, there are 14 living former prime ministers, although the oldest, Gaullist veteran Édouard Balladur (1993-95), is 95 years old. It is also true that misfortune of various kinds has befallen several senior politicians in recent years: former Minister of Finance Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a maid in an hotel, one of his successors Hervé Gaymard resigned after claiming public funding for a lavish apartment in Paris, Minister of the Interior Claude Guéant served a prison sentence for misappropriating public funds, another interior minister, Christophe Castaner, was regarded as having condoned police brutality and former Minister of Justice Jean-Jacques Urvoas was convicted of fraud and breaching official secrecy.
A few other senior figures have moved away from purely national politics. Former finance and economy minister Christine Lagarde is now President of the European Central Bank, her predecessor Thierry Breton is a member of the European Commission and one-time Minister of Foreign Affairs Michel Barnier served as a European commissioner and then the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator before a failed bid to be the Republicans’ presidential candidate in 2022.
More significant, I think, has been the shattering of the mainstream French political parties. From 1958, when General Charles de Gaulle emerged from retirement to become first Prime Minister of France then President of the Fifth Republic, until Emmanuel Macron’s election in May 2017, the presidency was held either by the Socialist Party or by the succession of centre-right Gaullist parties: the Union for the New Republic (1958-67), the Union for the Defence of the Republic (1967-68), the Union of Democrats for the Republic (1968-76), the Rally for the Republic (1976-2002) and the Union for a Popular Movement (2002-15), which was then rebranded by former president Nicolas Sarkozy as the Republicans.
That all changed when Macron, formerly a member of the Socialist Party who was Minister of Economics and Industry under President Hollande, first declared himself an independent, then in April 2016 founded the liberal, pro-business centrist party En Marche! (roughly translated as “Forward!” or “Let’s Go!” but also conveniently its leader’s initials, EM), later La République en Marche! The new party somehow caught the mood of France, and Macron used it as a platform to win the presidency convincingly over Marine le Pen of the National Front in May 2017. A month later, astonishingly, La République en Marche! swept to victory in elections for the National Assembly, winning 350 seats. The Republicans could only manage 136, losing nearly 100 deputies, while the Socialist Party was brutally shorn of 286 seats and left with only 45.
The formerly dominant parties, the Republicans and the Socialists, have never recovered. In 2022, after Macron had again defeated le Pen to be re-elected as President, his recently assembled Ensemble coalition, dominated by La République en Marche!, lost its outright majority in the National Assembly but remained the largest group, while the Republicans declined further, returning only 61 deputies. On the left, the Socialists joined a new alliance, the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale, or NUPES), in partnership with the French Communist Party, the Ecologists and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. NUPES won 131 seats but were still in a distant second place, and only 28 of those were Socialists.
Meanwhile, in 2018, Marine le Pen had renamed the National Front as the National Rally and was going a long way to ridding it of its most extreme elements, having expelled her own father, the party’s founder Jean-Marie le Pen, in 2015. The strategy paid dividends. A year after Marine le Pen assumed the leadership in 2011, the National Front saw two deputies elected after a decade without representation in the National Assembly; in 2017, that rose to eight; 89 were elected in 2022; and now the National Rally is the third party with 142 deputies.
In less than a decade, then, the two dominant parties of the Fifth Republic have been diminished or all-but-smashed (in the case of the Republicans), there has been a succession of fractious left-wing alliances and the future of Ensemble/Renaissance is deeply uncertain; can Macronism outlast Macron, who must step down as President after his second term ends in 2027? This in turn has left many leading politicians distanced or exiled from their traditional ideological homes, and it is perhaps no coincidence that two of the three candidates Macron has considered for Prime Minister, Cazeneuve and Bertrand, left their respective parties.
Political parties are not immortal. In the United Kingdom, the Liberal Party, the home of Lord Palmerstone, William Gladstone, H.H. Asquith and David Lloyd George, faded from its position as one of the main parties of government, and at the general election of November 1922 it was overtaken for second place in the House of Commons by the Labour Party. It has never recovered its former strength. The Irish Parliamentary Party, which had been the main proponent of Home Rule for Ireland since 1874, was effectively destroyed at the 1918 general election and replaced by Sinn Féin before quietly dissolving itself in 1922.
In Italy, Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana), founded in 1943, was a dominant force in post-war politics, providing every prime minister from the creation of the Italian Republic in 1946 until 1981, again from 1982 to 1983 and from 1987 to 1992. But it became mired in scandal and corruption endemic in Italian politics, and was disbanded in 1994, dividing between the Italian People’s Party (Partito Popolare Italiano), its legal successor, and the Christian Democratic Centre (Centro Cristiano Democratico). Both have since vanished from the political landscape.
It may well be, then, that the Republicans are the last in the line of Gaullist parties which stretches back to the Rally of the French People (Rassemblement du Peuple Français) founded by de Gaulle in 1947. I wrote in The Critic in July that the traditional political spectrum of “left” and “right” was losing its meaning, as newer parties espoused ideologies which drew from both sides. In particular, I said that calling the National Rally “far-right” or even “right-wing” was “hopelessly simplistic and inadequate”, because its policies on immigration, citizenship and French culture and values might be regarded as conservative or belonging traditionally to the right, but some of its economic and social ideas, like lowering the retirement age, imposing a windfall tax on energy companies and supporting domestic industries have more than a whiff of the statist left about them.
The Socialist Party might retain a little more parliamentary strength than the Republicans, but it was outpolled by La France Insoumise within the NPF and relations between the two parties are highly fractious. More telling, perhaps, are the results of the last presidential election in 2022. While it was clearly a contest between Macron and le Pen, Mélenchon won nearly 22 per cent of the vote in the first round, only 420,000 votes (out of 36 million cast) behind Marine le Pen. Valérie Pécresse, the Republicans’ candidate, was fifth with only 4.8 per cent, while the Socialist Party’s Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, was a dismal tenth, with 1.8 per cent (616,478 votes, only just double the number she received solely in Paris to be elected as mayor in 2014). The next presidential election, in April and May 2027, will be a different contest because Macron will not be involved and it is not clear who will represent Ensemble, but there is as yet little expectation that candidates from the Socialists or the Republicans will play a significant role.
Final thoughts
This sense of transition in the French political system goes a long way to explain the apparent paucity of plausible candidates to be Prime Minister, especially with a National Assembly so badly (and relatively evenly) divided and with so many internal hostilities and red lines. Whoever is eventually selected will face a delicate, arduous and often-frustrating task in assembling and holding together even a loose coalition which will allow a government to survive until next summer. Yet I can’t help feel that there’s more than that.
Yes, the President can select anyone he chooses, in theory. He is not limited to members of the National Assembly (indeed, any deputy who was appointed would have to give up his or her seat for the period of a premiership), whereas British prime ministers, to draw a loose analogy, must choose most of their administration from the two Houses of Parliament. (Outsiders can be ennobled and installed as ministers in the House of Lords: Sir Keir Starmer has appointed five ministers in this fashion but there are obviously limits.)
On the other hand, ministers in the UK Government are generally highly political animals, which gives them survival skills and a degree of resilience. Members of Renaissance are probably right to think that Thierry Beaudet would struggle as Prime Minister given his lack of political experience, because being in government is not just an exercise in efficient and orderly administration. It also requires qualities like persuasion, managing colleagues, creating miniature coalitions behind proposals and ideas, finding common ground between apparently disparate people.
For all the supposed freedom of choice and the breadth of the talent pool, President Macron has turned essentially to political workhorses so far in the shape of Cazeneuve, a former Prime Minister, and Bertrand, who held several ministerial positions. Similarly, such freedom is not exploited as widely as some might desire in Washington: of the 16 members of President Joe Biden’s cabinet, three were state governors, three were officials in the federal government, one was a United States Senator, one a member of the House of Representatives and one a city mayor. More than half, therefore, a solid political insiders.
If I have a final, final thought it is this. The notion of appointing people from outside the legislature and outside the “political community” to be senior ministers or even the head of government is in some ways reductive. It implies that politics is simply about efficient management derived from subject expertise, and diminishes or even dismisses the part that ideas play. I wrote in July that doctrine, or ideology, or a political philosophy—call it what you like—is not merely no bad thing in politics, but it is the lifeblood of the democratic process. For a government to know what it wants to achieve, it must have an overarching vision, a destination to which the logistics of the journey, while important, are secondary. You might instinctively want to appoint a teacher as education minister, or a clinician as health minister, or a diplomat as foreign minister, but it is no guarantee that they will have a strong sense of purpose and direction. Administration is one element of governing, but politics is another.
Meanwhile, President Macron’s strange, bad-tempered, drawn-out Gallic interpretation of The Apprentice continues. Who will be Emmanuel’s apprenti?
You'd enjoy latest Rest is Politics podcast. Campbell & Stewart discuss French politics in some detail.
Good to see France is still a basketball. 115debt / gdp. And if and when it forms a government any budget has to be approved by the EU. That means ECB in Berlin. Bon chance Mon amis.