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In what most people were expecting to be the first rather than third nation-state to take an embarrassing stumble/near fall this week (thanks Syria and South Korea), the French Republic has collapsed as well...
...or at least the government, as Michel Barnier goes down as the shortest term Prime Minister in modern French political history. Lasting about 3 months, which is to say about twice of long as the UK's shortest and longer than a head of lettuce. (Barnier will stay in place as a caretaker until a new replacement is found, but is politically dead.)
It's been a bad couple of weeks for the Macron administration and French geopolitical fortunes. After the unfavored outcome of the US Presidential Election and subsequent (deliberate) collapse of the German government for elections in early 2025, France has also so far failed to find a blocking minority within the EU to derail the EU-Mercosur tract block trade agreement (which is strongly opposed by politically powerful farming and agricultural interests but is supported by German-aligned industrial interests), and in the near-abroad France's position in Francophone Africa, already weakened by the military coups last year, as Chad ended the defense pact that legalizes French presence within hours of Senegal's president calling on French to close its military bases there.
The later issues don't formally have anything specifically to do with the collapse of the French government in parliament, where the proximal cause was budget disputes. Macron's government, sensitive of the overall deficit which led French bonds to near parity with Greek bonds. While some of this is Greek rising up since the 2009 fiscal crisis, for someone of Macron's political origin in particular, this was a case of France going down. This led to trying to pass a budget with spending cuts, which allowed the French opposition- and crucially the Le Pen faction that had previously offered conditional support- to invoke a vote of no confidence. Since blocking the bill and no confidence were tied, it was functionally a dare to Le Pen to do so, given that Le Pen has been able to extract policy concessions to date as condition for maintaining support.
Le Pen turning against the ruling party so wasn't exactly unexpected, given that the French government prosecutors just last month were seeking to jail Le Pen for two years and bar her from running for office for five, which would include the next French presidential election in 2027 where Le Pen would be a front runner, over an ongoing case accusing her of using EU parliament funds for party staff between 2004 and 2016.
(This case's timeline- which was coincidentally only prosecuted in the later half of this year after Le Pen's unexpectedly strong showing in the July 2024 elections where her party 'only' got third after leading the first of two rounds of voting- also coincidentally loosely corresponds to the rough timing of when La Pen's cash-strapped party took a Russian bank loan to keep the party afloat in 2014, which is one of the origins of the accusations of French far right and Russian alignment and general themes of Putin bankrolling anyone right of European center. In 2015, the then-EU President, German but general French ally Martin Schulz, initiated a fraud investigation on the basis of La Pen EU-parliamentary assistants also being members of La Pen's french political party. (This is nominally illegal, despite the strong overlap between EU and national political parties- see Poland's Donald Tusk.) Part of Le Pen's public reasoning behind taking the loan from a Russian bank was that no one else would. Given the long struggle between the Le Pen family and the French establishment, the lack of funding at the time may not have been a total coincidence, nor the timing of the prosecution nearly a decade after it's initial public reporting.)
The so-what for this fall is that the French Government, like the German government last month, has entered a period of chaotic ambiguity that won't resolve itself more clearly until next year. The French parliament is roughly divided into thirds between Macron's centrists, Le Pen's right, and the socialist left, meaning the next Prime Minister is going to be equally weak and beholden to external support. The French government will enter into next year without much ability to pass new laws (i.e. in response to Trump / Russia-Ukraine / anything else), and without a 2025 budget or a clear way to get to one either (other than capitulation to either of the other wings).
Strictly speaking this doesn't require new elections under the French government. In fact, per its Constitution France can't hold new parliamentary elections until a year after the last one, i.e. until July 2025. Further, the next Presidential election is scheduled for 2027, and Macron could, in theory, just ride out years of instability and institutional paralysis. On the other hand, an opposition-parliament could be so obstructionist/frustrating that the political gridlock crisis compels a resignation and new elections.
In practice, I'd suspect new elections in July, if only to try and break the gridlock and try and get a majority one way or the other. If Le Pen and various far-right elites are barred from election for the next few years, a summer election could enable Macron a chance to try and disrupt Le Pen's control of her party by letting more co-optable persons rise... but I'd also say this is a desperation concept for someone in a desperate context.
But as for what else this might mean for Europe in 2025? It remains to be seen. A lot of variables no one can credibly claim to know the full impact of are in play, ranging from Trump to the German election to now France. Given how even the UK government is on shakey legs- the UK PM Starmier has seen a -45 favorability drop since being elected in July- and several of the key power centers in Europe who will shape what can, and cannot, be politically achieved on the continent will be uncertain for some time yet.
The ball is in Macron's court because of the mechanisms of the constitution.
The nation can't be governed as it is (a government by the right or the left would be immediately censored, and the one from the center just failed).
He has essentially three choices:
None are good for his political prospects.
The depth of the financial crisis that is about to hit France is not to be underestimated, it definitely possible that it would reach the same proportions as the Greek crisis, except with a major Eurozone member. And other Europeean governments are unstable as well.
Do you mind expanding or posting some links as to the pending French financial crisis? I find many people love throwing out bearish statements, but rarely do they come to fruition.
I should do an effortpost on it since I've been religiously consuming economic takes on it for months now from both the left and the right.
But the short version is that France has been living above its means for a long time, that political will has never managed to lower spending and that we're so tax happy that there's no more juice to squeeze.
German style fiscal discipline is politically untenable in France, but French style dirigisme is banned by the EU. So the continuous policy of every government has been to pretend to be center-right and do potemkin reindustrialization whilst all of the actual business left the country and they grew the deficit.
And now we're at the stage where interest on debt is very large, and France barely managed to escape its bond notation being downgraded to a level that percludes safe investment funds from touching it (a now forgeone conclusion given the political instability). So it's going to become much harder to borrow, and nobody has the political will to seriously cut into the budget.
Hence how this government has fallen in fact: their budget was mostly tax increase (in the highest taxed country in the world) which is the reason stated by the RN for their key support to the censorship.
The usual next step for countries in this state is for the IMF to come in with your creditors and force you to cut things out of the budget and sell assets. The escape from that fate is to get bailed out by a friendly country, which in this case would have to be Germany, but Germany too is broke right now.
It's even less that Germany is broke and more that it is constitutionally forbidden from assuming debt that it could afford to take on. This is/was the reason for the breakdown of the German coalition, as Scholz was trying to change the debt break in order to take on more debt.
The issue for France is that it is too big for Germany to simply bail out... without substantial, major, concessions that make it extremely clear (to the German public) that it is a purchase, not a loan to never be paid back.
Imagine after all the losses they took in regaining them, France sells Alsace-Lorraine back to Germany to keep their economy afloat.
Not a likely scenario by any means, but could you imagine?
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I don't even want to imagine the political consequences of selling France to the Germans in the way Greece was. "The diktat of Munich" would take a whole new meaning.
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