Emmanuel Macron Is Hell-Bent on an Austerity Coalition
The French election saw the left-wing New Popular Front easily defeat Emmanuel Macron’s allies. But almost six weeks later, Macron still refuses the winners the chance to govern, as he tries to cobble together a minority coalition with conservatives.
French president Emmanuel Macron in Nanterre, France, on August 2, 2024. (Christian Liewig / Corbis via Getty Images)
How far will Emmanuel Macron kick the can down the road? For much of the past month, the French president has shuttled between his official vacation residence in Provence and the Olympics, repeatedly heading back to the capital for cameos alongside medal-winning athletes. But the conclusion of the Paris games on August 11 also ends the political “cease-fire” declared by Macron in July.
The Olympics afforded a brief honeymoon that allowed the president to brush over the stinging defeat dealt to his political project just weeks earlier. On July 7, the snap elections called by Macron at the beginning of the summer tore the rug out from under his coalition in parliament. The president’s allies lost nearly ninety seats in the National Assembly, in which the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) emerged as the largest single bloc.
Alleging in a July 10 public letter that “nobody won” the elections, Macron’s main priority since that point has been to thwart the NFP’s claim to govern. The left-wing alliance — which includes Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, the Parti Communiste Français, Les Écologistes, and the center-left Parti Socialiste (PS) — together holds 193 seats in parliament. This is well beneath the 289 seats needed for an absolute majority, but still gives it what the French call a “relative majority” over Macron’s Ensemble (166 seats) and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and its allies (143 seats). On July 16, Macron reinstated the outgoing government, aligned to his party, as caretaker ministers.
In the weeks since, nothing has changed in the raw mathematical reality. As the largest coalition in the new National Assembly, the NFP is demanding the right to form a government and structure parliamentary work along its agenda. Its platform includes an increase in the minimum wage, the repeal of Macron’s 2023 hike in the retirement age, and increased taxes on the wealthy and corporations. While after their surprise electoral success the different NFP parties at first struggled to agree on a unifying candidate, on July 23 they finally put their differences aside. They selected Lucie Castets, an upper-level civil servant, as the NFP’s nominee for Matignon — the Parisian palace housing the prime minister’s office.
Even in a hung parliament like this, tradition would have that Macron first accept the possibility of a cohabitation — the French term for the situation in which the president and an opposition prime minister govern together. In a television interview scheduled the same evening as the Castets announcement, Macron pointedly refused the Left’s nominee, arguing that “it’s not a question of the name” and that it’s “false to say that the Nouveau Front Populaire has any sort of a majority.” As of mid-August, Macron has not even met with the Left’s proposed prime minister.
This is not quite the coup that Macron critics have decried, but it marks a break from precedent on the president’s part. The center-right former prime minister Dominique de Villepin argued as such in an interview on July 11, claiming that there’s an “order” that Macron had to follow: the NFP’s first-place finish meant that they be granted the chance to form a government before other alternatives are attempted. Those scenarios include a revamped centrist coalition, a more formalized pact with the center-right Républicains — who have forty-seven seats in the new house — or else a technocratic government with few powers beyond administration and budgeting.
But Macron’s summer pause has also tied the French political calendar to a new priority. Fall is budget season, with the preliminary drafts of the 2025 financing law due before parliament on October 1. The outgoing government is drafting ministry-by-ministry spending targets, but it would struggle to go further without the new National Assembly voting it in as a governing cabinet. Meanwhile, a chorus of institutions both domestic and international are criticizing the paltry state of finances left by Macron. France’s expected budget deficit for 2024 stands at 5.5 percent of GDP — well above the 3 percent EU target that the president and his allies claim as their goal for 2027, at the end of Macron’s second and final term. The threat of EU budget-disciplining measures could easily rein in the action of France’s next government.
Left-Wing Nominee
Largely unknown until July, Castets has used the weeks since nomination to increase her name recognition in the broader public. In fact, her emergence from relative obscurity is part of what made her a good candidate for the Left. Beneath the surface of unity, the NFP remains riven by clashing interests and strategic readings, especially pitting the Parti Socialiste against France Insoumise. Castets has the advantage of relative independence from any specific current. A former member of the Parti Socialiste, she can calm fears on the alliance’s right wing of excessive control by Mélenchon’s party. But the real ideological victory for France Insoumise is the programmatic agreement bringing together the NFP, to which Castets has pledged her loyalty.
In an August 12 letter to opposition parties cosigned by the alliance’s leadership in parliament, Castets laid out the priorities — and governing style — of a possible NFP government. “The majority held by [an NFP government] is only relative and it will therefore have to convince beyond the ranks of the Nouveau Front Populaire in order to build parliamentary majorities,” she wrote. She promised to involve opposition figures in the drafting of legislation and grant them more space in the lower house’s agenda. As far as policy is concerned, she laid out five priorities: purchasing power—including the repeal of the 2023 retirement age increase and a minimum wage increase — reinforcing the education and hospital systems, the green-energy transition, and fiscal reform through higher taxes.
Programmatically, that remains a nonstarter for Macron. In their comments to the press, Macron’s advisors and allies have claimed that the president’s red line is blocking any reversal of the “supply-side” thrust of the policies enacted over the last seven years, something that would make any left-wing government impossible — or at least anything that France Insoumise, the NFP’s largest party, would accept. “Jean-Luc Mélenchon will not get to designate a candidate,” outgoing government spokesperson, Prisca Thevenot, said on July 12. Dismissing Castets and an NFP government, she called for a centrist coalition of “republican forces” that would include “social democrats” and the center-right Républicains.
Slapdash Alliance
When Macron returns from the August 15 holiday weekend, he’ll face growing pressure to come to some sort of decision. Throughout the week of August 19, he is slated to meet with representatives of the various groups in parliament, with some floating the idea that the president could make his next move by the end of that week.
The hypothesis of a centrist “republican arc” coalition has some observers dusting off possible nominees like Bernard Cazeneuve — a conservative figure on the right wing of the Parti Socialiste, who has been both interior minister and François Hollande’s last prime minister. This is the kind of figure whom Macronists call a “social democrat.” But the stronger pull is likely toward the right. Often-cited conservative figures include Xavier Bertrand, the right-wing president of the Hauts-de-France region. Le Figaro has speculated about the president’s growing ties with Valérie Pécresse, the president of the Île-de-France region around Paris and the Républicains’ candidate in the 2022 presidential elections. But she is said to be unpopular in the center right’s parliamentary group.
In response to Castets’s letter, Gabriel Attal, Macron’s outgoing prime minister, wrote on August 13 to the heads of five opposition caucuses of what he deemed the “republican left and republican right” — excluding both France Insoumise and Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. Though he tersely nods to “the environment” and “public services,” it is budgetary rigor and the “defense of values” that figure at the top of Attal’s priorities. The center’s overtures are mainly directed toward Laurent Wauquiez, leader of the new Républicains caucus. Wauquiez, known to be building toward a presidential bid in 2027, has rejected talk of a formal alliance with Macron. Yet in July, he said he would be open to a potential “legislative pact” with the president’s coalition.
But that, too, could prove extremely unstable. Even taken together, Macron’s coalition and the center-right opposition barely clear two hundred votes in the new assembly; in the last legislature, they together held an absolute majority. But the experience of 2022–24, when the center right led Macron’s minority government along on a tightrope despite their near-identical politics, does not bode well for the two forces forming a durable relationship. (Indeed, the expectation that the Républicains would prompt a no-confidence vote this fall was part of the calculation behind Macron’s dissolution of parliament in June.)
For any right-wing pact to work, it would be even more dependent on the tacit approval of the Rassemblement National to survive any no-confidence votes. In the past, Le Pen proved amenable to letting legislation pass and has benefitted from positioning her party as a force for order and stability; Jordan Bardella, the Rassemblement National’s presumptive prime minister candidate, made budgetary orthodoxy into a key plank of his campaign this June. Already in the last National Assembly, the far-right party’s votes were critical in approving the president’s stringent 2023 immigration reform. But compromise will have its limits, as Le Pen’s force can’t totally ditch its antiestablishment veneer.
Blocking the Rassemblement National’s seemingly inevitable breakthrough this summer was reason enough for the NFP to claim a victory. Yet the balance in the National Assembly seems most primed to pull the next parliament to the right — however chaotic any of that legislating may be. Through the coming instability, the left-wing alliance’s main challenge will likely be to preserve its hard-won unity — if only to stubbornly show that there is, still, another way.