What is Michel Barnier's plan for France?
The new prime minister faces almost-insuperable challenges: to understand how he will address them, you need to understand his long public career
White smoke!
Earlier this week, I looked at the political crisis in which Emmanuel Macron found himself. Shocked by the strong performance of the far-right National Rally in June’s elections to the European Parliament, the French president dramatically announced he was dissolving the National Assembly and calling fresh elections, but when voters went to the polls on 30 June and again on 7 July, they did not deliver the reassurance Macron hoped for.
The National Rally emerged as the largest single party, but with only 125 seats out of 577 in total, it was nowhere near a majority in the assembly. In addition, the hastily assembled left-wing alliance the New Popular Front (Nouveau Front populaire) could muster 180 deputies drawn from no fewer than 16 parties, although the vast majority come from La France Insoumise, the Socialist Party (Parti socialiste) and the Left Party (Parti de gauche). Most stingingly of all, the centrist coalition Ensemble pour la République, of which the Renaissance party founded and inspired by Macron makes up about two-thirds, was second with 159 seats. It had shed 86 deputies compared to the previous assembly, by far the heaviest loss of any party.
The incumbent prime minister, Gabriel Attal of Renaissance, had only been appointed in January but clearly had to bear a great deal of responsibility for the electoral setback. He offered to step down the morning after the assembly election but Macron refused his resignation, only to accept a week later on the condition that Attal remained in office as a caretaker until the president could appoint a new prime minister. With the National Assembly split very roughly three ways, however, finding a nominee who shared some elements of Macron’s policy platform but could also at least win the benefit of the doubt of a majority of deputies was a challenge. Attal became the longest serving caretaker premier in the history of the Fifth Republic, and it was only on Thursday 5 September, two months after the election, that Macron nominated a new prime minister.
To general surprise and some bemusement, the president’s choice was the former chief Brexit negotiator for the European Commission Michel Barnier. It is worth looking in some detail at his long career to understand his politics but also how he conducts himself in the political arena. Then I will sketch out the immediate priorities for Barnier and President Macron and assess the difficulties the new government will face.
Barnier’s pedigree
The new prime minister is a 73-year-old political insider of a quintessential nature: a veteran of the succession of Gaullist parties which dominated the centre-right until the mid-2010s, he was a ministerial adviser for most of the 1970s, and won election to the National Assembly for his native Savoie in south-eastern France representing the Rally for the Republic (Rassemblement pour la République, RPR). In 1982 he also built a base in local politics as president of the general council of Savoie, then a region of 325,000, and won renown and respect as co-president of the Albertville 1992 Winter Olympic Organising Committee.
In 1993, the two major right-wing parties, Barnier’s Rally for the Republic and the Union for French Democracy (Union pour la démocratie française) founded by former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, won a landslide majority in the National Assembly. President François Mitterand, that grandest and most imperial of Socialists, aged 76 and having been in office for a dozen years, was forced to appoint Édouard Balladur of the RPR as prime minister, and Barnier became minister of the environment and way of life. When Jacques Chirac won the presidency in 1995 and named Alain Juppé prime minister, Barnier became minister for European affairs, then left office when the Socialist Party won the legislative elections in 1997.
Barnier had enough political weight to be named one of France’s two members of the European Commission in 1999 alongside Socialist Pascal Lamy. Under Romano Prodi as president, Barnier was given responsibility for regional policy, including the management of the enormous European Regional Development Fund, designed to transfer funding from richer to less prosperous regions of the EU to develop infrastructure and services. He left the commission a few months before the end of his term; when President Chirac’s Union for a Popular Movement (Union pour un mouvement populaire), a Gaullist successor of the RPR, suffered a catastrophic defeat in the French regional elections in March 2004, the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, reconstructed the government and appointed Barnier as foreign minister to replace Dominique de Villepin (who moved to the Ministry of the Interior).
It was a short tenure. At the end of May 2005, Raffarin, his unpopularity soaring in the opinion polls after France voted against the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe in a referendum, quit as prime minister and was replaced by de Villepin. Barnier was ousted as foreign minister, and angrily criticised “the beheading of the ministerial team at the Quai d’Orsay”. It was especially galling that he was succeeded by Philippe Douste-Blazy, a cardiologist with little experience of foreign affairs. Barnier reflected:
I know the rules and the laws of politics. They’re hard, but they don’t however prohibit the expression of regret. Regret that we are leaving you so soon, much sooner than we thought.
He added that the referendum had demonstrated that France must seek to influence the European Union by persuading voters rather than preaching at them.
That means that in Brussels and Strasbourg, we try to convince rather than impose our views, to get people to go along with us rather than force them to do so. We have the proof now that we can’t advance the European project for our citizens without our citizens.
Critics of the European institutions would argue it is a lesson still not entirely learned. But was a short-term setback for Barnier. Nicolas Sarkozy was elected president in 2007, and his chosen prime minister, François Fillon, after a month with an interim cabinet, recalled Barnier in June 2007 to be minister of agriculture, food, fishing and rural affairs. He was regarded as a shrewd appointment, given his experience at the European Commission and the esteem he enjoyed in Brussels. He proposed a new vision of the Common Agricultural Policy which emphasised fairness and sustainability rather than unfettered market forces, increased the budget for organic farming and steered resources away from cereal farmers towards livestock.
He left the government in June 2009 when he headed the UMP’s list for Île-de-France in the European Parliament elections, but his tenure as an MEP was extremely short. In November, Sarkozy nominated him for a second stint at the European Commission, and, after some wrangling, he was awarded the Internal Market portfolio, taking in oversight of financial services. In the wake of the global financial crisis, there was a lot of criticism of so-called “Anglo-Saxon” light-touch banking regulation, and the appointment of a French commissioner to responsibility for supervision of the sector was portrayed by Sarkozy as a significant victory. There were rumours that the prime minister, Gordon Brown, had agreed to Barnier’s appointment in exchange for Baroness Ashton of Upholland, at that point trade commissioner, becoming a vice-president of the Commission and high representative of the Union for foreign affairs and security policy. One anonymous Labour minister lamented “In the long term, the internal market job will prove much more significant. We backed the wrong horse.”
In advance of taking up the post of internal market commissioner, and during his nomination hearing in the European Parliament, Barnier performed a remarkable balancing act between the de minimis regulation favoured by Britain and the French-style dirigisme that some felt was now vital to prevent another financial crisis. He displayed free market credentials by quoting from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, but stressed there would be no race to the bottom in terms of social standards. Overall he gave the impression of someone who was wholly in command of the detail of policy but also optimistic about his coming term of office. He was, however, clear that there had to be far-reaching change.
We will not come out of the crisis as if nothing has happened. We must learn all its lessons.
Barnier was true to his word. Between 2010 and 2014, the commission handled 40 new pieces of legislation on the internal market and financial services reform, including the Single Supervisory Mechanism he brought forward in 2012 and the foundations of the Digital Single Market. Measures like capping bonuses for bankers and restricting short selling were not popular in the City of London but Barnier was judged by his pan-EU audience to have handled a difficult brief well and methodically.
In 2014, for the first time, the party groups in the European Parliament proposed nominations or Spitzenkandidaten for the presidency of the commission. The European People’s Party held its congress in Dublin in March, and Barnier put himself forward for election, but he was comfortably defeated 382 votes to 245 by Jean-Claude Juncker, who had just stood down as prime minister of Luxembourg. Juncker would go on to become president of the European Commission from 2014 to 2019, though he was not an especially effective one, dogged by controversy and accusations of heavy drinking.
For two brief stints in 2014—April to May and then during July—Barnier stood in for Italy’s Antonio Tajani as commissioner for industry and entrepreneurship. During his time in Brussels, he had been at pains to stress his independence from Paris but it had come at a cost: he had lacked the support of his party, the UMP, to be the candidate for president of the commission, and in 2015 he lost out to the 40-year-old Laurent Wauquiez as the nominee of the freshly rebranded Republicans for the presidency of the Regional Council of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. He salvaged some momentum by serving as special adviser for European defence and security policy to President Juncker in 2015-16 but it was slender consolation.
It was the president of the commission who came to Barnier’s rescue again in the summer of 2016. In July, Juncker appointed him chief negotiator for the Commission Taskforce for the Preparation and Conduct of the Negotiations with the United Kingdom—the European Union’s lead negotiator for the process of Brexit after the UK had voted in a referendum the previous month to leave the EU. He would assume his duties formally on 1 October. Juncker explained:
I wanted an experienced politician for this difficult job. Michel is a skilled negotiator with rich experience in major policy areas relevant to the negotiations… He has an extensive network of contacts in the capitals of all EU Member States and in the European Parliament… I am sure that he will live up to this new challenge and help us to develop a new partnership with the United Kingdom after it will have left the European Union.
Barnier said publicly he was “honoured to be entrusted” with the role, and Juncker was right that he was widely experienced, in the National Assembly and the European Parliament, as a minister in the French government and a member of the European Commission. On the other hand, he was 65 years old, and the potentially gruelling position he was taking up was only ranked at director-general level within the commission, below his previous status. There was also still tension with the financial services sector in London following his tenure as internal market commissioner.
His position as negotiator would occupy him until 2021. In 2019, his team was strengthened and recast as the Task Force for Relations with the United Kingdom, and in February 2020 he was mandated by the European Council to undertake trade negotiations with the British government. The EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement was concluded at the end of the year, and with his mandate due to expire in January 2021, Barnier was appointed special adviser to the new president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to oversee the ratification of the agreement; responsibility for its implementation passed to the vice-president of the commission, Maroš Šefčovič.
While Barnier was often a hate figure for politicians and the media in the United Kingdom during the negotiations, his European colleagues regarded his tenure as broadly successful. He was hugely respected by those who worked directly under him, had considerable mastery of his brief and remained courteous, calm and patient. He made extensive efforts to understand the motivations of his British interlocutors and the pressures to they might be subject, even reading Stanley Johnson’s 1988 novel of Brussels-based derring-do The Commissioner in an attempt to gain additional insight into the mindset of his son Boris. By contrast, the UK negotiators, especially the ministerial leads David Davis, Dominic Raab and Steve Barclay, and the wannabe-statesman David (now Lord) Frost who was Johnson’s Europe adviser 2019-20, made next to no attempt to put themselves in the mentality of the EU team, and consequently failed again and again to understand what was happening.
In 2021, Barnier published My Secret Brexit Diary: A Glorious Illusion, an account of his time as the EU’s chief negotiator. It contained few revelations, but reinforced the impression of a serious-minded man who had done his homework, and had also made the effort to stay in contact with member states’ governments so that the European Union presented a united front. He had admiration for the stubborn determination of prime minister Theresa May: “She hangs in there, stands her ground, hunkers down and attacks when she has to”. Her successor, Boris Johnson, was much more cavalier and instinctive, and Barnier leaves little doubt as to where his sympathies lie when he describes Johnson clearly having “not taken the time to go into the details himself with his team”.
The book makes clear he regards Brexit as a mistake; its very subtitle, “A Glorious Illusion”, but his cards face-up on the table. When the UK finally left the EU on 31 January 2020, Barnier writes “I still don’t understand what the point of it is, even from the perspective of the British national interest”. This was, though, beside the point. His mandate was clear: he was to represent the interests of the European Union and its members states and preserve the integrity of its institutions. It was inevitable that he would resists ham-fisted attempts by British negotiators to engage with individual governments in the margins, yet this provoked fury in some pro-Brexit politicians. They failed to grasp that Barnier was a man executing a brief.
Barnier is not a crush-the-nation-state Brussels fanatic. In February 2021, having given up his full-time Brexit responsibilities, he announced the formation of a new political faction Patriot and European, which was presented as a “working group” within the Republicans. Having unveiled his new body at the National Assembly, he told deputies and senators that he wanted to explore new policy ideas on a number of issues including “the authority of the State, decentralisation and environment-friendly growth”.
Although he had just turned 70, many suspected that Patriot and European was part of a potential presidential bid by Barnier: Emmanuel Macron’s term would end in April 2022. It was taken as read, though he made no official statement, that the president would stand for re-election, and already other candidates had declared themselves. Marine le Pen, president of the National Rally, had announced in January 2020 that she would stand (as she had done in 2017), and in November Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the left-wing La France Insoumise, another 2017 hopeful, confirmed his intention to run again. A few weeks after Barnier launched his group, Jean Lassalle, a conservative protectionist who had founded Résistons! to contest the presidency in 2017, joined the field.
Barnier confirmed in August 2021 that he would seek the Republican nomination for president. The party was in uncertain circumstances. Having held the presidency under its various banners from 1959 to 1974 and 1995 to 2012, its candidate in 2017, former prime minister François Fillon, had failed by less than 500,000 to reach the second round of voting, leaving Emmanuel Macron and Marine le Pen to fight for the Élysee Palace. It was the first time since 1981 that its candidate had been eliminated. It had then performed poorly in the 2019 European Parliament elections, losing 12 of its 20 seats and finishing fourth. But the Republicans held their ground in the regional elections in June 2021 and demonstrated that they still had an electoral base.
Candidates for the presidential nomination needed the support of 250 elected representatives spread across at least 30 departments. When the deadline arrived in October, there were five aspirants: Michel Barnier; Xavier Bertrand, president of the Regional Council of Hauts-de-France; Éric Ciotti, a deputy for Alpes-Maritimes; Philippe Juvin, mayor of La Garenne-Colombes in north-west Paris; and Valérie Pécresse, president of the Regional Council of Île-de-France.
Barnier had been expected to run as a moderate, but he had surprised many by promoting “security and immigration” as the central focus of his campaign. Unregulated non-EU migration was weakening France’s sense of identity, he argued, and he pointed to Brexit as the potential outcome of failing to tackle the problem before it became irresistible. He proposed a three- to five-year moratorium on immigration from outside the EU, but, hand-in-hand with this, he also talked about France “must regain our legal sovereignty so that we are no longer subject to the rulings of the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights”.
This was for many people an extraordinary stance for the former chief Brexit negotiator, and there was a degree of ironic mirth among British pro-Brexit observers. But that was to miss the fact that the French electorate felt a profound sense of dissatisfaction with contemporary politics and especially with the effects of large-scale immigration. It also reflected Barnier’s belief that a failure to address this dissatisfaction, at whatever cost to prevailing ideological opinion, would simply open the door to the National Rally, the stance of which was much closer to being outright anti-EU and sympathetic to the idea of withdrawal. Deal with it now, he was saying, or Brexit might spread to France.
The right of the Republicans had become a crowded area. Ciotti was a right-wing populist who was close to the National Rally on many issues of immigration, identity and security, Bertrand, having been regarded as a moderate, was moving towards a more conservative stance on issues like equal marriage, and Pécresse had talked about limits in immigration and the need for immigrants to speak French and to abide by the values of the republic. This close competition was reflected in the first round of voting for the Republican nomination when the result was announced on 2 December. Ciotti led with 28,844 votes, a whisker ahead of Pécresse on 28,179, while Barnier was third with 26,970 and Bertrand fourth with 25,213. Juvin trailed badly with 3,532.
The rules provided for a run-off between the top two candidates. Bertrand, tipped as the front-runner, endorsed Pécresse and she pulled ahead of Ciotti to win by 69,326 to 44,412. Barnier had missed out on being in the final two by only 1,209. Perhaps, though, it was a lucky escape. When the country went to the polls in April, Pécresse was beaten into a humiliating fifth position behind President Macron, Marine le Pen of the National Rally, La France Insoumise’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far-right nationalist Éric Zemmour of Reconquête. She could manage only 4.8 per cent of the vote, and was barely ahead of the left-wing environmentalist party the Ecologists, recording the worst result for the Gaullist centre-right in the history of the Fifth Republic.
It seemed an obvious opportunity for Barnier to bow out of public life. He was in his 70s and could look back on a long and successful political career in a number of roles. Yet he did not quite disappear, instead making occasional interventions to champion the rule of law and the EU’s internal market. In February 2023, he praised Rishi Sunak for resolving some of the issues on the status of Northern Ireland in the Windsor Framework, agreed with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. In August, he called for the UK and the EU to negotiate a new agreement on foreign policy and defence, pointing particularly to the war in Ukraine and ongoing instability—and the gradual diminution of French influence in particular—in parts of Africa, notably the Sahel.
In November last year, Barnier was interviewed by Henry Mance of The Financial Times. It was very far from a valedictory performance, and the message Barnier seemed to want to convey was the need for the French political establishment to recognise the challenge of Marine le Pen and the National Rally, understand its scale and its motivations, and find ways of addressing the very real grievances of voters without empowering the far-right.
He blames the European Court of Justice for reducing states’ freedom to act in the name of national security and expanding migrants’ rights to bring family members: “You can find nothing in the French constitution about migration, and there is almost nothing in the European treaties. For 30 or 40 years, there’s a kind of interpretation that is always in favour of the migrants . . . We have to rewrite something in the [EU] treaties or in the [European Convention of Human Rights].”
This was the same approach he had articulated in his bid for the Republicans’ presidential nomination 2021. His warning was clear: “If we don’t do that—as Brexit was improbable and happened—something in France which is improbable could happen: the election of Ms Le Pen as president.” Mance described him as “grandiose” when he added “I’m the only one in France perhaps to know exactly why the Brexit happened”. Grandiose, perhaps, but not necessarily wrong. The last paragraph hints at the future, at least in Barnier’s eyes.
Barnier, who was first elected to public office 50 years ago, wants his party Les Républicains, Macron’s Renaissance and others to coalesce behind a single, centre-right candidate for the presidency in 2027. Could it be him? “That’s not the issue now,” he says, briefly flustered. I insist. “It’s not a question of people for the moment.” On this point, at least, Barnier may see room for flexibility.
No-one foresaw that, more than nine months after this interview, President Emmanuel Macron would invite Barnier to become his fifth prime minister. In the long and anguished negotiations following the dramatic but complicated elections for the National Assembly in June/July, many names were floated, some improbable, and Barnier’s was heard once or twice, but never with any real sense of momentum. As I wrote only a week ago, the front runners, if they could even be described that way, were Bernard Cazeneuve and Xavier Bertrand, but stalemate was still the most likely candidate.
Barnier was appointed on 5 September. I want now to look at the challenges facing him and the landscape in which he is operating, and this (perhaps exhaustive) review of his career will be relevant. No-one with 50 years in politics comes to a new job fresh or unmarked, and to understand the man President Macron has chosen, it’s essential to understand his journey to the Hôtel Matignon.
The new prime minister’s agenda
Finding a candidate for prime minister who had a chance of lasting more than few weeks was so complicated because, for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, the National Assembly is divided more or less evenly into three groups: the New Popular Front of La France Insoumise, the Socialist Party and others; the centrist Ensemble coalition dominated by Macron’s Renaissance; and the National Rally and its handful of allies.
(It is worth noting here that the NPF is the largest group in the assembly, with 180 deputies, which should not be ignored. However, it is also important to note that the largest single party, by some way, is the National Rally, which has 125 deputies. Renaissance has only 98 and La France Insoumise only 71. Moreover the whole NPF represents 25 per cent of the votes cast, while the National Rally received 32 per cent. Any claims to have “won” the elections are deeply qualified and partial.)
The fury of the NPF at Macron’s dismissal of its proposed candidate for prime minister, little-known civil servant Lucie Castets, is substantially grounded on a false sense of victory. Mélenchon’s accusation that Macron had “stolen” the election is absurd, as is that of Olivier Faure, leader of the Socialist Party, that it is a “denial of democracy”. The Constitution of France is very clear that the appointment of the prime minister is a matter for the president, who may choose whom he likes, and even if the NPF had won a majority in the National Assembly, of which they are 109 votes short, it would still only be practical politics, not constitutional obligation, which would give them the opportunity to name the prime minister.
The president appoints the prime minister but may not dismiss him or her. It is the National Assembly which can remove a government once it is installed, by passing a motion of no confidence, and it was clear very quickly after the election results were known that a candidate endorsed by LFI in particular had little hope of surviving the opposition of the National Rally and many on the centre-right. Castets was a political MacGuffin, useful for Mélenchon and others to move the narrative along but never having a realistic prospect of being a sustainable head of government.
The parliamentary arithmetic created a situation of negative influence: while no group had the strength to impose a prime minister, the three main blocs could go a long way towards exercising a veto. As one political commentator explained:
Barnier is a compromise candidate… he is a personality that is acceptable to the centre and the right and will not be censured immediately by the extreme right.
That the objections of the left are based on misrepresentation both of the constitutional position and of its own strength is important but does not mean the anger can be brushed aside. Saturday saw protests in favour of the NPF and against Barnier’s appointment across France; the Ministry of the Interior estimates that 110,000 people took part, while one protest leader claims a figure of 300,000. In truth, in a country of more than 68 million, this is not a revolution in the making, and it may be more significant that an opinion poll found 52 per cent of respondents “satisfied” with Barnier’s appointment. The new prime minister faces three principal challenges as he begins to govern.
Survival
The same opinion poll which found a slender majority satisfied with Michel Barnier’s appointment as prime minister also revealed that three-quarters of respondents did not expect him to last very long in office. The National Rally’s parliamentary leader, Marine le Pen, has denied rumours that she gave assurances to President Macron not to support a no-confidence motion against Barnier, and she has stated that her party will not join the new government. Nevertheless, it is the case that Barnier, while not a fellow traveller, is the closest of any likely premiers to some of the National Rally’s policies, and, short of being able to fill the position with one of its own, the party will not find a more amendable prime minister. It would have little to gain from unseating Barnier in the short term.
The NPF will almost certainly table a motion of no confidence at some point once the National Assembly is in session. But the arithmetic makes this an unlikely proposition: the deputies of LFI, the Socialists and others will not co-operate with the National Rally even if le Pen were to wish to bring the government down, and it is worth remembering, as Le Monde pointed out, that only once in the history of the Fifth Republic has a spontaneous motion of no confidence been seen through to its conclusion. That was in October 1962, when a motion against prime minister Georges Pompidou was passed—but President Charles de Gaulle responded by dissolving the assembly, and the ensuing elections saw his Union for the New Republic win an additional 40 seats and Pompidou re-appointed as prime minister.
Barnier has powerful opponents, but his good fortune is that they despise each other more than they dislike him. Even a marriage of convenience between the NPF and the National Rally is hard to imagine, and in basic procedural terms he is only in danger of both groups vote for the same motion of no confidence. In the first two years of President Macron’s presidency, while Édouard Philippe was prime minister, 17 separate motions were tabled but the various groups proposing them were never able to unite behind a single instrument.
The new prime minister will have to choose ministers for his government. Under Article 8 of the constitution, the president formally appoints ministers but does so “on the proposal of the prime minister”, and in effect it is a work of co-operation and compromise. Each individual nomination will be carefully scrutinised both within the National Assembly and outside for wider significance, and Barnier will want to give the appearance of as broad a coalition as possible, though there will be no National Rally ninisters, nor, one assumes, any from the NPF.
Traditionally, the first major executive act of a prime minister is to deliver a government policy statement to the National Assembly (and the Senate). Under Article 49 of the constitution, this is not a requirement, nor is there a set timetable: Attal took 21 days to make such a statement, while his predecessor, Elisabeth Borne, waited 51 days. After the statement is delivered, it is open to the prime minister to seek a confirmatory vote from the assembly, as did Édouard Philippe in 2017 and Jean Castex in 2020; however, neither Borne nor Attal took the risk. If Barnier does not engineer a vote, it will then be open to the National Assembly to consider a vote of no confidence as soon as it is in session, for the tabling of which the threshold is 58 signatures. The vote would then have to be held within 48 hours.
Getting a budget agreed
Barnier’s first legislative task is agreeing the government’s budget for 2025. This is no small task. France’s debt is far higher than the three per cent of GDP which EU rules—which were relaxed during the Covid-19 pandemic—allow, and if public spending is not cut substantially to bring the country’s finances back under control, it could have a fine of 0.05 per cent of GDP imposed by the European Commission every six months. The previous government of Gabriel Attal proposed that spending in 2025 would be at the same level as this year, €492 billion, but Barnier would need to find savings of €30 billion to bring the country within the EU limits. Proposals must be submitted to the commission by 20 September, though the government has asked for an extension until 15 October, with which Brussels will likely be content.
The European Commission has some flexibility. Although it can impose six-monthly fines, it is not obliged to do so. Equally, while member states are supposed to submit plans to control spending within four years, it can allow a period of seven years instead. Some observers expect Barnier’s deep familiarity with and experience of European institutions to benefit France, not only giving him an initial fair wind in Brussels but suggesting he will be a persuasive and supple negotiator on France’s behalf. The commission, however, is subject to opposing pressures: it will, of course, want to be accommodating to a man who is fundamentally an ally, but at the same time, as the fiscal rules kick in again for the first time since the pandemic, it needs to be seen as meaning business and cannot allow sanctions like the 0.05 per cent fine to be a dead letter.
There is another parallel timetable, which is that Barnier must present his budget to the National Assembly by 1 October. How will he deal with the legislature? In an official handover ceremont at the Hôtel Matignon, he said that a fundamental duty of the prime minister is “to say the truth, even if this truth is difficult,” including “the truth on the financial debt”. As his chief of staff, he has appointed Jérôme Fournel, who was previously director general of public finances at the Ministry of the Economy and Finances from 2019 to 2024, and his task will be “to address the budget situation and the future European negotiations”. However, both the far-left and the far-right have vehemently opposed spending cuts, while the centre-right has said increasing taxation is unacceptable.
The budget will be considered by the National Assembly throughout October and November and probably into December. It will be a Herculean task to avoid measures so noxious to left and right that they co-operate to unseat the government, while also preventing attempts to amend the budget radically and make it unrecognisable. He is committed, for example, to preserving the hard-fought raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64 and the reduction of business taxes to stimulate growth. While Barnier’s negotiating skills are rightly praised, and he is respected for his ability to bring apparently irreconcilable differences to a mutually satisfactory conclusion, it is hard to see how he will be able to pilot a fiscally responsible, cost-cutting, essentially Macronesque budget through a National Assembly with powerful populist movements on both sides which are against spending reductions.
Keep the extremists at bay
The third task for Barnier, as much a personal one as part of his role as prime minister, will be to continue the argument he articulated last year, of addressing public concerns on immigration, security and identity without conceding ground to the National Rally. Marine le Pen has already tacitly endorsed the prime minister on these issues, telling La Tribune “It’s undeniable that Michel Barnier seems to have the same position as we do on migration”. There are rumours that he is considering reviving a Ministry of Immigration: Nicolas Sarkozy established a Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Codevelopment in 2007 to deliver on a campaign promise, but it was seen as a crudely political move, incurred the furious ire of the left and was wound up in 2010, its functions re-absorbed by the Ministry of the Interior.
Nevertheless, Barnier has said publicly that “control of migratory flows” is one of his priorities and has promised “concrete measures”. He has likened France’s borders to “sieves” and the public will expect action which is not only taken swiftly but also has noticeable effects. Here the prime minister is caught between a number of pressures. While tough action to restrict immigration will ensure some leeway from the National Rally, it will at the same time seemingly prove the accusations made by the NPF that he is the puppet of le Pen’s party. It also requires skilful handling in terms of presentation. Assuming that Barnier can make tangible progress on immigration and security, how does he persuade the electorate that this is preferable to voting for the National Rally, rather than happening because of the pressure le Pen and her colleagues are able to exert from the National Assembly? Proving that voting for the National Rally is unnecessary will be a challenging sales pitch.
Conclusion
Michel Barnier can hardly have expected to become prime minister of France at this juncture. At 73, he is the oldest person to assume the role in the history of the Fifth Republic, taking over from the the youngest, Gabriel Attal being 34 when he was appointed in January. He must be relatively downbeat about his prospects, given the obstacles in his path even to survive, let alone make progress on policy issues, especially on the budget.
He has one potential secret weapon. If French politicians, especially those on tje centre-right and right, are honest with themselves, Barnier’s premiership is the last option for President Macron. If he is voted out of office, it is hard to see how any candidate can lead a sustainable administration. Certainly the NPF does not have the strength in the National Assembly to do so, however towering its fury at Macron’s rejection of Castets. It is simplistic to call a country “ungovernable”, but if Barnier cannot succeed and stay in office, what is the next step?