One in, one out. On Monday night, “Bye-bye Bayrou” parties were held around France as François Bayrou, the now ex-prime minister of France, was ejected in a landslide parliamentary confidence vote against his plans for austerity. Bayrou, the third French PM to resign in a year, had lasted just nine months. His predecessor, Michel Barnier, was toppled after just three.
Twenty-four hours after the government’s collapse, the revolving door was opened again and Emmanuel Macron appointed a successor: the 39-year-old defence minister and one of the president’s closest allies, Sébasian Lecornu. This was an uncharacteristically swift attempt by Macron to fill the vacuum and quell a mood of insurrection in the country. But it may not be enough.
Much depends on how extensively the call for a nationwide shutdown of transport and other services by a new grassroots protest campaign called Bloquons Tout! (Block Everything!) is heeded by the public.
The new PM took office amid street clashes with police, burning bins, barricades and go-slow operations around the country. Some regional train services are down. The main trade unions have separately called for mobilisations and protests on the 18 September.
Organised anonymously online over the summer, and later supported by some leftwing parties, Bloquons Tout!, like the gilets jaunes anti-government movement of 2018, is leaderless. Analysts, though, are wary of drawing close comparisons with the gilets jaunes. “The movement’s ideological and sociological profile is difficult to establish,” said Pierre Purseigle, lecturer in modern European history at the University of Warwick. “The political situation is evolving and we may know within weeks if Bloquons Tout! is a flash in the pan and or the harbinger of a mass social movement.”
In a climate of anxiety about the cost of living and frustration at the decline of public services, any new protest movement has plenty of anger to draw on at the moment. But Purseigle said: “Anger may not be the most problematic manifestation of current frustrations. More worrying is the gradual disengagement with the political process, a diminishing faith in democracy as a system. If Bloquons Tout! fails to coalesce into a mass and sustained social movement, this may well be why.”
***
Why is France in such a mess?
A clash over public spending, as politicians try to curb France’s high level of debt, is the immediate flashpoint for the latest turbulence – failure to pass austerity budgets the reason the last two PMs have been ousted. The national debt is running at 114% of GDP and the budget deficit of 5.8% of GDP, nearly double what is permitted for eurozone countries.
But this crisis is also political, a function of a much deeper malaise in the relationship between the people and their politicians, explained Angelique Chrisafis, the Guardian’s Paris correspondent. This malaise worsened after Macron’s response to last year’s snap elections and could blight French politics even beyond the 2027 presidential election, helping Marine Le Pen’s far-right party to gain ground.
The political scientist Alain Duhamel, interviewed in Le Monde, compared France’s systemic instability to the “crise de regime” that led De Gaulle to set up the Fifth Republic in 1958. “The question posed now,” Duhamel said, “is that of the survival of our political system.”
In naming Lecornu as prime minister, Macron could be brewing fresh trouble: the president is again defying pressure to appoint a premier who has the backing of the left. Leftwing parties jointly came out on top numerically in last year’s election. But to the fury of leftwing voters, Macron appointed the conservative Michel Barnier. The political equation does not seem to have changed much.
As a centre-right figure, Lecornu risks the same fate as his predecessors as he tries to pass a budget by year’s end. Growing clamour for a wealth tax is becoming a politically totemic issue. And in a gridlocked parliament, it is far from certain he can balance public fears about austerity against Macron’s pro-business agenda.
***
Will the far right make gains from this?
The shape and direction the current upheaval takes could be decided on the boulevards – and online – if Macron refuses to negotiate with the left, and if today’s protests escalate. Either way, the crisis in France could reverberate around Europe. The French economy is the eurozone’s second biggest. France has a leading role on the global stage in rallying support for Ukraine. Macron, who runs foreign policy, is in a war of words with the US over French recognition of Palestine. Beyond simply distracting Macron at a volatile geopolitical juncture, France’s unending wobble could have a longer term spillover effect. The crisis is, as the Guardian’s leader column noted, “a gift to Marine Le Pen”. Support for the anti-immigrant Le Pen party, National Rally, is running at about 33%, and a far-right/conservative coalition looks increasingly plausible – particularly, Purseigle said, if there is further fragmentation on the left.
A far-right surge in France would be the domino effect of this saga that other mainstream European leaders must be dreading.
***
‘A large-scale provocation’
An alarming and potentially significant escalation in the Ukraine war is still being decoded. Poland and Nato air defences shot down Russian drones that entered its airspace on Wednesday morning. Our report has Donald Tusk’s stark warning and Jakub Krupa is monitoring developments on our live blog.
The incursion looks like a deliberate provocation, analysts say. According to Gabrielius Landsbergis, the former foreign minister of Lithuania, there have been five drone incursions into Poland in recent weeks that the government in Warsaw chose not to respond to, in order to avoid escalation. “The Russians have been testing the waters, probing for Nato’s red lines and trying to get to a point where this becomes normalised for public opinion,” he said. “It is destabilising but it is also a message to Europeans to think: ‘Our governments can’t stop Russia. But maybe if we stop helping Ukraine, we’ll be safe.’
“We, especially on Nato’s eastern flank, are like frogs being boiled.”
Paul Taylor, a member of the European Policy Centre’s defence/security project, said Russia’s “testing” of Nato has escalated as Kyiv’s allies step up military support and discuss security guarantees including “boots on the ground” to defend any ceasefire. “Although Poland has said it will not deploy troops to Ukraine, this could be Putin trying to send a signal to the Europeans in general to back off,” he said. “The Russian calculation could be that this will serve as a warning – that will scare a fraction of European public opinion into getting out to demand ‘peace now’ on their territories.”
To receive the complete version of This Is Europe in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.
