France’s Parti Socialiste Agrees to Bad Deal With Macronists
On Thursday, France’s Parti Socialiste refused to back a motion of no confidence in François Bayrou’s government. It sold out its left-wing allies for feeble concessions, renewing the party’s dismal record of tailing neoliberal centrists.
French Parti Socialiste first secretary Olivier Faure delivers a speech during the debate prior to the no-confidence vote on the prime minister's admistration at the National Assembly in Paris on January 16, 2025. (Thibaud Moritz / AFP via Getty Images)
François Bayrou comfortably survived his first confidence vote on Thursday, a little over one month after the veteran centrist became France’s prime minister. The January 16 vote, called by the left-wing force La France Insoumise (LFI), came two days after Bayrou’s inaugural “general policy” statement to the National Assembly on Tuesday. In the end, however, the no-confidence motion won the support of only 131 MPs in the 577-seat lower house — two hundred votes less than the no-confidence vote that sunk the short-lived government of Bayrou’s predecessor, Michel Barnier.
Largely symbolic, this week’s series of events in the National Assembly nonetheless marks a brief moment of respite for Bayrou, who has been tasked by President Emmanuel Macron with succeeding where Barnier failed. The new premier faces what he himself has called a “Himalayan” task: securing an austerity budget for 2025 out of France’s fractured parliament, which is divided into three warring blocs.
A longtime ally of Macron, Bayrou was appointed as premier after the more conservative Barnier was no-confidenced on December 4. Winning the combined support of the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) and the far right, that vote was provoked by Barnier’s attempt to force the passage of a social security financing bill through a so-called “49.3,” a special constitutional power allowing the adoption of legislation without a vote unless blocked by a successful no-confidence motion.
For now, Bayrou’s main success has been in peeling off the center-left Parti Socialiste (PS) from its allies in the NFP. In the near-party-line vote on January 16, the seventy-one MPs in LFI’s caucus were joined only by MPs of the Écologistes (the Greens) and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF), two of its partners in the NFP. Two Écologistes and one PCF MP did not vote along with their parties. More significant, fifty-eight of the sixty-six MPs under the PS, the NFP’s second-largest force, abstained from the motion, opting to prop up Bayrou alongside the minority governing coalition of the Macronist center and the right-wing Les Républicains (LR). The abstentionists also included the bloc of MPs aligned behind Marine Le Pen and her hard-right allies.
“We have chosen not to practice the politics of ratcheting up tensions, because it will only lead to the worst of all outcomes: the rise of the far right,” the Parti Socialiste’s first secretary Olivier Faure told parliament. Hoping that Bayrou’s government offers the possibility to win concessions on taxation, public services, and a promised dialogue among “social partners” on the reform to the pension system, Faure nonetheless maintained that his party would remain in “the opposition.”
To its allies, the center-left force’s stance on Bayrou is the sign of a dangerous breach in the NFP. “The Parti Socialiste has isolated itself from the left-wing alliance,” LFI caucus leader Mathilde Panot told journalists shortly after the no-confidence motion was defeated. “I’m all for a social conference on the retirement system, but is that worth a non-censure over the [general policy address]? I don’t think so,” wrote Lucie Castets, the NFP’s nominee for prime minister after the alliance emerged as the largest bloc in last summer’s snap elections, in a January 14 text to Faure, alluding to Bayrou’s concession to the Parti Socialiste. Revealed by Libération, Castets finished off her message to the Parti Socialiste leader with a warning: “If you sell out the NFP, the left-wing electorate will be furious with you.”
Where the Parti Socialiste would land on Bayrou has been at the center of attention in recent weeks. Following the fall of Barnier’s government on December 4, the party’s leadership entered into negotiations with Macron and figures from the president’s bloc, talks that picked up speed following the appointment of Bayrou on December 16. The new premier, for his part, quickly echoed Macron’s sentiment aired in early December that the next minority government could no longer survive solely on the good graces of the far right, essentially meaning that it would have to cultivate ties with the center left.
The PS’s split from its partners is also an escalation of the power struggle within the NFP alliance, a battle that largely pits it against France Insoumise. Though long perceived as an advocate of left-wing unity, Faure has increasingly yielded to the right-wing faction of his party systematically opposed to any pact with Jean-Luc Mélenchon and LFI. The Mélenchonists, on the contrary, have advocated for a full-opposition strategy vis-à-vis the Macronist center, one bent on provoking Macron’s resignation and forcing new presidential elections.
After joining the Parti Socialiste in the mid-December talks with the center, the Écologistes and the PCF have largely withdrawn from this approach. Vowing to support future no-confidence motions, Écologistes caucus leader Cyrielle Chatelein said before parliament Thursday, “In a country where more and more farmers are throwing in the towel, where workers can no longer live from their salary, where teachers feel abandoned, where health workers are exhausted, where defenders of the environment are ignored, and young people are looked down on — is it really wise to continue with the same policies? No.”
Platitudes
The Parti Socialiste is getting the short end of the stick in its rapprochement with the Macronists. A prime minister’s “general policy” speech is usually low on substance, but even by those standards Bayrou’s January 14 address amounted to little more than an hour and a half of platitudes and lofty rhetoric. Beyond a vague “social conference” tasked to draw up possible edits to Macron’s 2023 pension reform, the concessions that Bayrou has pointed to include the rolling back of staff cuts to the teacher rolls and abandoning the cancellation of social security reimbursements for some medical expenses.
In response to the general impression that he had not acceded to enough of the Parti Socialiste’s demands in his speech, Bayrou was even pressed into sending it a January 16 letter to plead for its support. The new prime minister promised to abandon a proposed tightening on sick leave for public employees and to maintain a windfall tax on high earners already included in the draft budget rolled over from the Barnier government.
Moreover, what retreats Bayrou has pointed to amount to minor tweaks to a budgetary framework largely focused on spending cuts, with a few exceptional levies to deflect criticism of a lack of fiscal justice. Bayrou has, however, slightly walked back his predecessor’s proposed budgetary tightening for 2025. If Barnier hoped to lower the deficit to 5 percent of GDP in the new year, his successor is aiming for a figure at around 5.4 percent. France finished 2024 with a budget deficit at 6.1 percent of GDP, more than twice the nominal European Union limit.
From the Parti Socialiste’s point of view, the main question for Bayou’s survival will probably revolve around the outcome of the new prime minister’s stated plan to amend Macron’s unpopular 2023 increase in the pension age. In his Tuesday address, Bayrou sidestepped the party’s demand that he suspend that reform, which is currently phasing in an increase of the pension age from sixty-two to sixty-four. Instead, he has offered to submit that reform to a new round of negotiations between French unions and business lobbying groups — and propose any eventual suggestions to a vote from parliament.
That framework is a far cry from the NFP’s manifesto pledge to repeal the reform in whole — and there is little reason to be confident that the new negotiations (which began on January 17) will lead to significant amendments. The new talks essentially give the employers’ lobby a veto over any concessions to workers, and labor unions have already expressed skepticism. While Bayrou claims that he would accept whatever emerges from those talks — such as new exceptions for early-career workers — one condition is that they must not dilute the budget savings made from the rise in the retirement age. Bayrou’s maneuver is a political punt to buy time.
There is a hard limit to any real concessions that Bayrou can grant to the Parti Socialiste. More than anything, he cannot shed the support of the conservative Républicains, who remain a main pillar of his government in control of a slate of ministerial portfolios despite the party’s slim forty-seven MPs in the lower house.
In the days leading up to Bayrou’s address, there was considerable concern across the Right about the direction of the premier’s negotiations with the center-left socialists — with Les Républicains’ leadership even airing the possibility that they would withdraw from participation in his government. Those fears were largely allayed by Bayrou’s speech, however, in which it became clear that there would be little in the way of serious overtures while reaffirming that containing the deficit would remain the main thrust of his premiership.
Tightrope
Bayrou’s real battle still lies ahead. Both the Parti Socialiste’s and the far-right Rassemblement National’s stance on this week’s no-confidence motion involved a good deal of political posturing, and both forces have maintained that they could vote such a motion in the future. In fact, the Parti Socialiste and the far right ironically share much the same short-term tactical goal: proving their credentials as serious “parties of government,” unbeholden to the “extremist” tendencies of their respective ideological camps. The Parti Socialiste may face a harder time walking the tightrope between the opposition and the center when the actual budget bill is on the docket later this winter. It could be easier to return to the NFP fold in a more concrete vote over a service-cutting and investment-slashing budget.
Meanwhile, the far right has tacked back this week to the position it held for much of last fall, after Le Pen and her allies abstained from the first NFP no-confidence motion against Barnier in early October. Its decision to ultimately oust Barnier in December caused some tensions within its caucus, stoking fears that the far-right force would lose what trust it has managed to win in recent years among establishment conservative voters. It’s not clear that Le Pen will make the same bet next time, in the likelihood that Bayrou too is forced to use the “49.3” to force through his government’s budget packages. If Le Pen can earn similar concessions to those won from Barnier last fall, it may opt to give Bayrou a pass.
Though the far right has been largely on the sidelines as the new premier has focused on assuaging the Parti Socialiste, Bayrou has not closed the door on maintaining Le Pen’s tacit support. It was a critical personnel choice to safeguard Les Républicains’ participation in his government, but Bayrou’s reappointment of hard-liner Bruno Retailleau as interior minister was also a nod to the far right on immigration and policing policy. On January 14, Bayrou curtly said that it was his government’s “duty to lead a policy of control, regulation, and deportation against those whose presence, by their sheer number, jeopardize national cohesion.”
The Parti Socialiste may be shifting, but Bayrou’s attempt to govern looks an awful lot like the one that failed in late 2024. For that matter, the public doesn’t have much confidence in it either. According to opinion polls, the French people don’t expect Bayrou to survive the year in his new role. Meanwhile, one strategic question still lingers in the back of everyone’s minds: how to position themselves before an eventual dissolution of the National Assembly and a fresh round of snap elections.