Glass Ceiling?

Barnier had in recent days made several policy concessions to Le Pen, designed to soften her opposition to his budget plan and its €60 billion in spending cuts and tax increases. Showing how much the Macron camp’s plans relied on an at least tacit pact with the far right, Barnier made no similar offers to the NFP — with even soft-left MPs like Jérôme Guedj bemoaning how roundly they had been ignored.

Yet Le Pen’s party was not to be seduced. The Rassemblement National instead criticized the budget plan from multiple sides. It wanted both to draw on popular discontent with proposed austerity measures and to reassure middle-income voters that it planned no tax hikes. It thus issued a counterproposal including both raised spending commitments — indexing pensions to defend them from inflation — and a steeper reduction of the deficit, by slashing what party spokesman Julien Odoul called “wasteful government programs” and “the handouts office for immigrants.” It sounded like a policy marriage for all, uniting a safety net for French nationals with the bureaucracy-cutting spirit of Ramaswamy-Musk–Milei.

Le Pen’s party has in recent years tended to shift toward more conventionally right-wing economic positions, dropping ideas such as Frexit that risk blowing up household savings, while also calling for far-reaching tax cuts and a budget rebate from Brussels. This turn, aimed at peeling off more middle-income voters, comes under the Rassemblement National slogan “order in the public accounts and in the streets.” Still, by European Union standards, France is a land of considerable labor movement mobilization and a sizable left-wing opposition. This demands that even Le Pen find some answers to “the social question,” more nuanced than the Reaganite notes of other hard-right forces like Giorgia Meloni’s coalition in Italy.

Ahead of the no-confidence vote, Le Figaro quoted a source close to Macron, claiming that Le Pen had exposed her own contradictions. Her reckless move to oust Barnier, the source insisted, would harden the “glass ceiling” that stops her winning over the “moderate” center-right electorate. But this is probably oversimplistic, especially as Macron’s unnecessary move to call snap elections in June is so widely blamed for pitching France into political chaos. A poll ahead of Wednesday’s vote suggested that a majority of French voters (63 percent), including a notable minority of those who back Macron’s party (27 percent), thought that he should resign if Barnier’s government fell, allowing for fresh presidential elections.

Macron cannot again call snap elections for parliament (a separate contest) until summer 2025, and he has few routes to a majority. After this past summer’s election, the NFP parties proposed civil servant Lucie Castets as prime minister in a minority left-wing coalition, but Macron dismissed the idea out of hand. If he toyed with appointing Bernard Cazeneuve — an ex-Socialist, pro-business centrist — as head of a center/center-right coalition, he dropped the idea when Cazeneuve proposed amendments to the pension reform. His name has again now resurfaced, though ahead of Wednesday’s no-confidence vote, Socialist leader Olivier Faure deemed it impossible. More likely is a technocratic stopgap until elections can be held.

In the homeland of such odd arrangements — Italy — the arrival of technocrats has often paved the way for far-right successors. In 2021–22, faced with Mario Draghi’s “national unity” government, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia was the only major party of opposition but also promised to follow most of Draghi’s EU-funded post-pandemic spending plans. This provided Fratelli d’Italia its springboard to electoral triumph. Today’s French situation offers a perhaps even worse picture for the centrist blocs. Here, unlike in Italy, the national government funded over half of post-COVID recovery spending, and as EU authorities now push for member-states to cut deficits, France’s debt is under especially severe pressure.

After Barnier

What of the Left — the kind that never sought compromises with Macron? Throughout his presidency, France Insoumise has intransigently resisted his agenda and even been able to pressure the other left-wing parties into an alliance largely tied to its own program. Its staunch defense of popular interests and developed policy agenda have pressured even most Socialists and Greens into stronger oppositional stances. But the NFP is an alliance of often-hostile parties, and it faces an uphill task to shape what happens next — or to be a real force in the next presidential election. Despite Le Pen’s legal problems, which may stop her from running in the contest expected in 2027, her camp is in a commanding position, routinely polling well over one-third of the vote and gaining ground within the traditional center-right electorate.

There is also a wider political problem. Even if recent left-wing electoral alliances largely took up France Insoumise’s program, little remains of this movement’s once-systematic critique of the institutional architecture of the European Union, its undemocratic means of shaping national governments’ policies, and its enforcement (however inconsistent) of “pro-market” diktats. There was good reason for these issues to retreat from focus as the hard austerity of the mid-2010s eased and EU authorities loosened their fiscal straitjacket in the pandemic period. Yet, these fundamental questions are rearing their head once more, and it may well be that a heavily indebted, crisis-riddled France is the epicenter of the bloc’s troubles in coming years.

Centrists’ failures will not automatically feed a solidaristic, left-wing response. In most European countries, they have not, and the Left is generally weaker than just after the 2008 crisis. The EU Commission, in tandem with bond markets and other powers, can seriously resist an anti-austerity policy in a heavily indebted member-state. For much of small-town France, including in middle-income groups, the Rassemblement National’s chauvinist brand of internal devaluation — less taxes, less social housing, less benefits for migrants — at least promises to offload the costs of the crisis onto someone else. Le Pen’s party may indeed profit electorally from fusing a version of austerity with the defense of select parts of the welfare state.

The Left is, at least, still in the fight. Time and again written off as unelectably extreme, France Insoumise has nonetheless carved out a distinct space for itself and established a strong position within a broad-left camp. This will never integrate some neoliberalized-left figures like François Hollande or Raphaël Glucksmann, who have an opposed agenda. But uniting the parties of the Left and their 25 or 30 percent of the vote is, in any case, far too limited a goal. To create a possible alternative government, the Left has to offer a credible path out of austerity and show that the debt cage is not just a force of nature. That also means frankly reckoning with the resistance its policy would face, in France as in the EU.