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Two main lessons are to be drawn from the fall of Michel Barnier’s government in France.
The first is that talk of Europe massively re-arming itself and substituting for the U.S. as the chief backer of Ukraine while maintaining existing levels of health care and social security is idiocy. The money is simply not there. The second is that the effort by “mainstream” establishments to exclude populist parties from office is doomed in the long run, and in the short run is a recipe for repeated political crisis and increasing paralysis of government.
Two countries are central to the European Union, the European economy, European defense, and any hope of European strategic autonomy: France and Germany. Within a month of each other, both have seen their governments collapse due to battles over how to reduce their growing budget deficits. In both cases, their fiscal woes have been drastically worsened by a combination of economic stagnation and pressure on welfare budgets with the new costs of rearmament and support for Ukraine.
In both cases, fiscal crisis has fed into the decay of the mainstream political parties that alternated in power for generations — a phenomenon that is to be seen all over Europe (and in the U.S., insofar as Trump represents a revolt against the Republican establishment). This decay is being fed by the growing backlash against dictation by the EU and NATO that is occurring across wide swathes of Europe.
In the French presidential elections of 2017and 2022, Emmanuel Macron defeated the Front National (now the Rassemblement National) of Marine Le Pen by essentially uniting the remnants of all the centrist parties in a grand coalition behind himself. The problem with such grand coalitions of the center however is that they leave opposition nowhere to go but the extremes of Right and Left.
In the case of France, economic stagnation and resistance to Macron’s free market and austerity measures led in June of this year to crushing defeat for his bloc in European parliamentary elections. Macron then called snap French parliamentary elections in the hope that fear of Le Pen and the radical Left would terrify French voters back into support for him. The result however was that Le Pen won a plurality of the vote, and while electoral deals with the Left gave Macron’s bloc a plurality of seats, they are heavily outnumbered by deputies on the Right and Left.
Macron then ditched his left wing allies and stitched up an agreement whereby Le Pen would support a centrist-conservative government under Michel Barnier in return for concessions on immigration policy and other issues. Bizarrely however, this was combined with continued “lawfare” against the Rassemblement National, with the prosecution of Le Pen for allegedly diverting EU parliamentary funds to support her party’s deputies. This is something that looks rather like a technicality or peccadillo, given what we know of the past behavior of EU parliamentarians — but would mean that, if convicted, she would be barred from running for the presidency in 2027.
Read here the dull article by The Responsible Statescraft
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