France seems ready to throw another PM

The French Parliament – in dead end for a year and more divided poisoned than it has been for decades – should throw another Prime Minister on Monday.

But the acute sense of the drama surrounding this last vote of confidence within the National Assembly of Paris is counterbalanced by a discouraged consensus according to which the almost inevitable dismissal of François Bayrou, 74, after nine relatively ineffective months, will do nothing to break the political field of France.

“This is a disaster. The situation is absolutely blocked,” said BBC’s BBC political commentator Bruno Cautrès.

Others have been even more severe in their diagnosis.

Marine Le Pen, parliamentary leader of the National Rally Rally Party, accused Bayrou of engaging in the “political suicide”.

The Prime Minister, a figure in research in the southwest of France with a tendency to frown and blur, launched himself the surprise vote on Monday, by seeking, as he explained, to “shock” politicians to agree on a means of fighting the crisis of imminent debt of the country.

Describing the national debt in spiral of France as “a terribly dangerous period … A moment of hesitation and trouble”, Bayrou warned that there was a “high risk of disorder and chaos” if the parliament failed to support its austerity budget with its aim of reducing government spending by 44 billion euros (38 billion pounds sterling).

Bayrou says that young people will be struggling with years of debt payments “for the comfort of baby-boomers”, if France fails to tackle a national debt of 114% of its annual economic production.

But Bayrou’s bet – variously characterized as a gesture of suicide bomber, a unnecessary Cassandra type prophecy and an attempt to put an end to his political career with a heroic act of self -sacrifice – seems almost certain to end with a failure later on Monday.

Despite some unruption frantic discussions, it seems that Bayrou simply does not have the votes.

At the heart of this “crisis” – a word that seems to have spent an entire year dominating the titles of French newspapers – is the widely turned decision of President Emmanuel Macron, in June 2024, to call a parliamentary election at a wink in order to “clarify” the balance of powers in Parliament.

The result was exactly the opposite of clarity. The French voters, more and more unhappy with their young impetuous and eloquent president, bordered to the extremes, leaving Macron wading with a weakened minority government, and a parliament so divided that today, many rival deputies cannot even bear to shake hands.

So what then?

Far from the parliamentary power of the difficulties on the left bank of the Seine de la Rivière de Paris, the atmosphere through France seems to derive to the right and the extreme right.

“Jordan, Jordan,” cried several hundred people who crowded around the 29-year-old leader of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, while he arrived in a large agricultural fair in Chalons-en-Champagne, east of Paris.

For an hour, Bardella crossed the crowd, taking selfies with his admirers.

“He seems to be a good guy. Someone you could have a drink. France has trouble. We pay too much taxes, and we don’t understand how they are spent. And prices up,” said Christian Magri, 44, computer programmer.

“(Bardella) will revise our country. I am not at all racist, but I think in France, we already have a lot of people waiting for accommodation and we cannot absorb all the miserable people in the world,” said a woman named Christine.

“He is a handsome man. His ideas are good. There are too many immigrants who come here. Mr. Bardella … wants to put the French first,” said Nadine, 61, who, like many others in the crowd, refused to give him a surname.

At one point, in the face of heart, I managed to reach Bardella and asked if he thought that – after the Trusted Voting Monday – there could be another Snap election which could see him emerge as the next Prime Minister of France.

“We are working on it. This country has been deadlocked for more than a year. It is dangerous to leave France to derive like that and to leave those in power for decades the country. We want to do our best to stop mass immigration in France. If we come to power tomorrow, we will implement a referendum on the question of immigration,” he said.

And yet, little in France believe that President Macron will call another early parliamentary election, or even that he will leave his own role before the end of his mandate in 2027.

More likely, another attempt to find a path to a functional minority government. Having tried several times to conclude agreements on the right, some wonder if Macron could try something new.

“We think it is time for the president to try on the left because we will have a different method. We will try to reach the compromises. We have proposed a budget that will also make investments for the future, for a green transition … while taxing the richest people of their fortune,” said Arthur Delaport, a socialist party of Normandy.

While speculation continues on who could choose like his next Prime Minister, other challenges are looming.

There is more and more concentration here on the perspective, not only of an important industrial action in the coming weeks, but a wave of street demonstrations. A basic movement of the base is called “blocks everything”, was active on social networks, urging the French to bring the country to stop this Wednesday.

“There is a bubble of exasperation in the country,” said the commentator, Bruno Cautrès, offering a warning to Macron.

“Macron has been extremely, extremely active at the international level, in particular with Ukraine in the past two weeks. And I think it’s time that Macron speaks to the French. Because … there is a very high level of anger, frustration, tensions.”