French President Emmanuel Macron named Francois Bayrou as PM today, a little more than a week after the previous PM was ousted in a no-confidence vote. Bayrou is a centrist who heads the Democratic Movement, a party allied with Macron’s Renaissance party. He becomes France’s fourth PM this year. (Washington Post)
The appointment of Bayrou marks Macron’s second attempt to manage the fallout from his fateful decision to call snap legislative elections in June, which left parliament without a majority alliance as the country hurtles toward a budget crisis. He first tried to placate the center-right in his informal minority coalition by appointing Michel Barnier. But in alienating the left-wing coalition that finished first in the elections, that strategy also left Barnier beholden to Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, which was ultimately its undoing.
Now, Macron has moved on to a different strategy: holding the center. His hope is that Bayrou, a well-known but not necessarily well-liked centrist, will be more palatable to the center-left Green Party and the more centrist wing of the Socialist Party, both of which have shown some openness to working with the new government. The trouble is that both the Greens and Socialists are currently allied in a parliamentary bloc with the far-left France Unbowed, which has already vowed to bring a no-confidence vote against Bayrou.
As a result, it remains to be seen whether Bayrou will fare any better in accomplishing the French government’s primary objective of passing a budget that addresses the country’s spiraling deficit and debt burden. Technically, that budget must be passed by the end of the year, but parliament will likely buy Bayrou some additional time by approving an emergency measure next week that would allow the state to maintain essential services while the new budget is being negotiated.
More broadly, the events of the past two weeks in France underscore the cost of political paralysis in Paris. Just yesterday, Macron was in Warsaw for talks with Polish PM Donald Tusk, reportedly about negotiations to end the war in Ukraine and plans to deploy a European postwar peacekeeping force there. That Tusk is taking the lead on such a significant issue already underscores how leadership on the war in Ukraine has shifted eastward in Europe.
But the fact that Macron had to leave the talks early to deal with the political crisis in France only further highlights how the impasse is handicapping France in European affairs. At a time when the EU is dealing with a number of significant issues—from the war in Ukraine and the return of Donald Trump to Syria’s postwar transition—that’s a problem for the entire continent.
Of course, as the French president, Macron still exercises control over foreign policy decision-making. But as a human being, he has a limited amount of bandwidth to do so, and evidently, the political dysfunction that he created is absorbing a lot of it right now.
