Papa To The Rescue.

And stop saying "it's not fair!"

I was planning to write about something else this week, but as it happens, the political crisis in France that I wrote about in the last essay has entered a new phase, and, once more, its implications extend well beyond the particular case of France, and help us to see where western parliamentary systems might be going. So in this update (shorter than usual) I want to briefly recount where we are, and then go on to look at some of the wider lessons.

As you have probably heard by now, on Thursday Macron asked Michel Barnier to try to form a government. (There’s a decent Wikipedia page in English on Barnier, now, which has just been updated.) Barnier is probably the most experienced politician in France today: he’s served as a Minister, as a European Commissioner, as the head of the right-wing parliamentary group in Brussels, and, of course, as the EU’s chief negotiator for the Brexit talks. But experience necessarily takes time to accumulate, and Barnier (who is now 73) has more than fifty years of political activism behind him, beginning with putting up posters supporting De Gaulle in the 1960s.

At first sight, or even second sight, this appointment seems strange. Barnier is, after all, part of the traditional Right that Macron has tried to destroy (as he has tried to destroy the traditional Left) and he comes from the old political class, with its Left-Right divisions, from which Macron claimed to be making a decisive break. After all, the National Assembly has plenty of young deputies who could have been chosen, and indeed the President wasn’t obliged even to choose an elected politician: one or two non-political names were also mentioned. Moreover, the other serious candidate, the former Socialist Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, is himself in his sixties, and has described Macron in private as “a child.” Why the sudden and violent swerve from away Gabriel Attal, the teenage former Prime Minister (and the youngest in French history) to Barnier, who will be the oldest?

Part of that is explained by the current chaos, which Barnier’s nomination may ease temporarily, but cannot fundamentally resolve. Recall that, in an act of political self-harm, Macron called an unnecessary parliamentary election that saw the strength of the parties supporting him reduce radically, such that it was impossible for them to even hope to form a government. Moreover, neither the “leftist” NFP coalition, nor the Rassemblement national (RN) of Le Pen and its allies had enough seats to form a government either. (Dirty electoral machinations had resulted in the RN having many fewer seats than its share of the vote entitled it to.) The result was deadlock. Barnier, however, came not from any of these three coalitions, but from Les Republicans, the much-renamed party of the traditional Right, which has fewer than ten per cent of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, and which had supported Macron’s government after the elections of 2022. Cue hysteria from the “Left.”

It’s true, of course, that the job was a poisoned chalice, and accepting it would probably end a promising political career. Few young and ambitious politicians today would take such a chance. For Barnier, that probably doesn’t matter very much: he’s an interesting throwback to an era when Prime Ministers were expected to have experience, and being a Prime Minister was your last job in politics and not your first. So anyone hoping for a future in politics kept their head well down. Moreover, anyone who was believed just to be a puppet of Macron would have been unacceptable to the National Assembly as a Prime Minister, from the word go.

Yet the fact is, that just naming somebody Prime Minister doesn’t automatically produce a government. That person has to have the skills to assemble a coalition of parties, and then distribute portfolios, to create a viable government, which in turn then has to survive the inevitable vote of censure. And Barnier is accepted, even by his enemies, to have these old-fashioned political skills. He’s a patient, undemonstrative individual without strong ideological convictions, who coped very well with the hysteria of British politicians during Brexit. It’s not certain that he will succeed: frantic calculations in the media and elsewhere suggest that he could probably assemble up to 220 seats into a centre-right coalition, with a theoretical maximum of about 250. Note that this would not necessarily have to be a formal coalition, but just informal assurances of support for important votes. And even then, his government would only survive with support from elsewhere or, more probably abstentions: a point I’ll return to (You can play this game yourself with a simulator published by Le Monde.) Nonetheless, from a purely technical perspective, he’s probably the only person capable of forming a government, which is the first interesting conclusion: why is the survival of the political system in France dependent on one individual who began his political career under Georges Pompidou?  And what wider conclusions can we draw?

Well, the answer to the first question is that, whilst Barnier has these skills, they are, in fact, nothing exceptional. It’s just that they were typical of politicians of his generation and a little later, and only a few of them now remain. There are one or two others who might have qualified: one name that was whispered was that of Edouard Philippe, a decade or so younger than Barnier, who was Macron’s Prime Minister during Covid and is generally respected. But Philippe neatly withdrew his name from consideration (and undermined Macron) by announcing that he would run for President in 2027. In the field of ruins that Macron has created in French politics, any younger politician with a degree of ambition would steer well clear of this unexploded bomb. Not for the first time, Macron’s destruction of the French political system comes back to bite him in a sensitive area.

As regards wider conclusions, I’ve pointed out on a number of occasions that today’s politicians just aren’t very good at being politicians. They know how to tweet, to undermine rivals, to always have the right opinions at the right time and to climb the ladder of their party—or The Party if you accept my terminology. But the old political skills of getting and staying elected, persuading others, forming coalitions, developing compromises and so forth are not in demand these days. Moreover, many politicians enter parliament now as beneficiaries of wider movements of opinion (often disgust with the incumbent government) rather than for any reasons of personal competence, and they know that they may well be swept out again with the next tide. In the UK, of Labour’s 209 new MPs after 4 July, few won their seats by their own efforts, and few can expect unaided to survive the next election. So the lessons are obvious: keep your nose clean, suck up to the leadership, get yourself known publicly and in the media as a loyalist, and hope that, even if you lose your seat next time, someone will offer you a decent job. It’s the same in France: “Vote for me, I was Macron’s Prime Minister designate except I never managed  to form a government”, is not going to help you get elected in 2027. In any event, many of Macron’s MPs, with no obvious future leader because Macron has destroyed all pretenders, seem to be ready to leave politics anyway.

In opposition to these mundane requirements for competence and experience, of course, is the persistent belief that youth, of itself, will always beat age and experience, Just Because. In many countries, politicians have ridden to power on the perception of youth and a change from fuddy-duddy old ideas. The most unfortunate example is probably that of the Nazis: Hitler was in his early forties in 1932, and some of the Nazis were younger. Mussolini was not yet forty at the time of the March on Rome. Come to that, Fascism as a movement emphasised youth, energy, and what we would now call “disruption” of old-fashioned political structures. But there are less contentious examples also: John Kennedy, of course, but also Harold Wilson, still in his forties when he became Prime Minister in 1964, pledging to remake Britain as a modern industrial nation. Tony Blair traded on his youth and outsider status in 1997, although he lacked Wilson’s (and Kennedy’s) political skills.

Macron has provided the ultimate parody of these tactics, as of so much else, and has surrounded himself with young and inexperienced advisers, and with equally inexperienced Ministers whose names, even now, few people can easily remember. With his talk of La Startup nation and of his mission to “disrupt” French politics, he seems to have envisaged Ministers arriving at work each day wearing tracksuits and baseball caps, riding on skateboards and listening to rap music on earbuds. So his choice of someone like teenager Gabriel Attal as Prime Minister was drearily inevitable, and the RN’s subsequent selection of the even younger Jordan Bardella as their public face was no surprise either. Unsurprisingly, both turned out to be pretty mediocre performers.

And in the end he was obliged, like the adolescent he still basically is, to go to Papa for help after weeks of false starts and agonised introspection, and to offer the job to someone he doesn’t like, and didn’t want to give it to. I don’t share the common view that this is a devilishly clever manoeuvre by Macron to choose a Prime Minister who would obediently implement his agenda. Not only is Barnier old enough to be Macron’s father, and was a political veteran when Macron was playing marbles in the playground, but he doesn’t need this job, whereas Macron needs him. In the event of a quarrel, Barnier could simply threaten to resign and plunge the country into chaos. We are going to see here just what the Constitutional distinction between the Head of State and the Government that runs the country actually means.

More generally, therefore, competence and experience turn out to have some value after all, and sending tweets, knifing enemies and looking good on TV do not, of themselves, give you the qualifications to run a country. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the two contenders for the US Presidency are no striplings either (Harris is sixty), or that the level of competence among their potential successors is so low. And I still have to pinch myself to remember that Liz Truss, who by all accounts was terrifyingly unsuited for the job, was taken seriously as UK Prime Minister for several months, before she was strangled and her body dumped in the Thames. Perhaps the generational decline in competence that we see in engineering and science applies just as much to politics? There’s a thought.

The second issue I want to address is the attitude of the “Left.” Now it’s reasonable to use the fact that you have more seats in parliament than any other group as a debating point. It was quite normal of the NFP to demand that Macron choose someone to form a government from their ranks, and to complain when he didn’t, although there is nothing in the Constitution to oblige him to do so. What is surprising and worrying is, firstly, the peremptory demand without qualifications that the person should be one of their own, and secondly the adolescent temper tantrum that followed the choice of Barnier. (It’s not fair! It’s not fair!) For a start, although the NFP bloc gained the most seats, they did so after some sordid deals which shut the Rassemblement national out of many constituencies Their share of the popular vote was significantly lower than that of the RN, even if they wound up with more seats. But the most worrying thing was the sense of entitlement: they demanded, in effect, to be in government, to implement the whole of their programme, and that the other parties should somehow stand aside and let them do it. But this sense of entitlement was not supported by persuasive arguments, a willingness to negotiate and compromise, or even any hurry to identify their candidate, which required weeks of much-publicised internal squabbling. Yet none of this affected the arrogance with which they demanded the French political system accede to their demands. And what’s more worrying, I think, is the way that the PMC-adjacent media around the world covered the story. The NFP, it was widely asserted, had “won” the election. They had the moral right to choose a Prime Minister. Macron was guilty of a”coup” and a “denial of democracy” in not giving in to their demands, and in choosing a figure from the Right.

All this becomes clearer if we recall that the western “Left” long ago abandoned any interest in what ordinary people think, or even how they vote. There’s an interesting history to this. The old Left always had two main strands to it: mass movements and mass political parties, often linked to trades unions, with sympathetic middle-class supporters in the media and the political system, was one. Whilst political leaders and officials did arise directly from the working class, the majority were sympathetic middle-class leftists who acted from conviction. Léon Blum in France, Hugh Gaitskell in Britain, were outstanding examples of such people but there were many more. The other strand was entirely middle class, usually university educated, and generally more interested in theoretical debates (often at high volume as I recall.) They were predominantly Maoists or Trotskyists, and were scornful of mass political parties and “bourgeois” politicians. They did not believe in fighting elections or in the possibility of taking power peacefully. They were mostly Leninist vanguard spare-time revolutionaries, there to lead ordinary people, and to instruct them how to behave.

They therefore situated themselves in the tradition, from the Communist Manifesto onwards, that their party would take the “leading role,” explaining and cajoling the great mass of the people into the need for revolutionary action. (Thus, incidentally, the distinction between “agitation,” to persuade the ignorant masses, and “propaganda” within the Party itself.) By contrast, the large and well-organised Communist Parties of France and Italy were dismissed as “Stalinist” relics, who would never be able to take power peacefully. This strand of thinking represented, if you like, the elitist rather than the democratic tradition of Socialism. One of their mentors was the maverick Marxist Louis Althusser, enormously influential among students in the 1960s and 1970s who famously taught that the thought of Marx was inherently correct: it was not right because it was true, as demonstrated by anything as banal as facts, but true because it was right, and there was no arguing with it.

Most of the young Marxists of the seventies rapidly dropped their shallow acquaintance with the thinking of the Bearded One, and moved sharply to the Right, forming the basis for the equally shallow French neoconservative movement that followed, and which endures to this day. But they did not abandon the elitist, theory-heavy, hectoring approach of their youth: witness ex-Maoist Bernard-Henri Levy stomping the world to persuade western governments to bomb people he disliked. A good topical example is Raphael Glucksman, one of the most voluble leaders of the NFP. He is the son of Andrei Glucksman, originally a Marxist, subsequently a violent right-wing opponent of Marxism. Glucksman fils, educated in elite Parisian institutions, began as a neoconservative (as his father ended) but more recently drifted into the orbit of the Socialist Party. Quite what his precise beliefs are now is unclear, but his intellectual heritage is clearly that of elitist entitlement, and distrust of ordinary people.

The “Left” as it now exists in most western countries consists overwhelmingly of these middle-class elitists, who have lost whatever acquaintance they had with the genuine ideologies of the Left, but have retained or inherited the sense of entitlement and the distrust of the capabilities of people like you and me. For such movements, nothing could be more unacceptable than seeing ordinary people organising themselves and collectively expressing their wishes. And since ordinary people are basically stupid, then if they express ideas which differ from the Right Ideas, it must be because they have been propagandised by rival forces: notably the dreaded fascists. They must be cajoled and harassed into the Right Way of Thinking.

Which explains a lot about recent events, including the “Left’s” dissociation from reality. They genuinely thought that the manoeuvres that brought them more seats than the RN somehow gave them the “right” to lead, with the obligation of others to follow. If Macron did not do as he was told, some argued, they should take to the streets to force him to obey, which was in fact attempted last Saturday, though not on a large scale. The fact that three-quarters of the French electorate rejected them, and that pretty clearly France is moving into a period of centre-right dominance with a significant populist element, escaped them completely. Most seriously, they seem just to have forgotten about Le Pen and the RN entirely. Their single political objective, that of keeping the RN away from power, was accomplished, and they conspired with other parties to keep the RN out of all important posts in the National Assembly. So the threat had been liquidated, the right-deviationists purged, and the “Left” could take power. Except.

Except what? Well, except that they had forgotten this was a parliamentary democracy. They thought the RN had been banished: for all practical purposes, it didn’t exist any more, and it could be disregarded. Except that they had forgotten that a government could be overthrown by a majority of the National Assembly, and that they themselves were a distinct minority, so it would be wise to seek allies and be ready to make concessions. Except that, by voting or abstaining, the RN could have a powerful voice in French politics, because a stupid and manipulated 37% of the electorate had committed the unpardonable error of voting for them and their allies. Except that the RN could tacitly keep a centre-right government under Barnier in power, just by abstaining. Except that they should have thought of all that before: it’s enough to know how to count. Now, personalities on the Left are screaming that Macron has “handed power” to the RN: what did they think was going to happen? Did it never occur to them to do a little simple arithmetic?

One of the most interesting consequences of this fiasco—and probably not confined to France—will be the effect on the elitist “Left” we have today. In most countries, it has effectively run into a brick wall. Even taking the most generous definition of the Left, and including all its mutually detesting components such as the Greens, there is scarcely a country where the vote of the “Left” exceeds a third of the electorate. The bizarre British system somewhat disguises thus, but the reality is that the Labour Party, for all its arithmetical domination of the House of Commons, could barely muster the support of one in three voters. Now, poor Mr Starmer seems unsure what to do next, apart from making the lives of ordinary people harder. As I have pointed out before, acquiring power is the only objective in the Party. Having purged his opponents, what is left for a politician like Starmer to do?

This cannot go on. In the last election in France, and in any number of opinion polls, the French have made their views very clear. The country is moving strongly in the direction of the centre-right, which is where it has been for most of the last couple of centuries. When Barnier spoke of his priorities—education, immigration and security—he accurately reflected most French people’s priorities as well. In a country where ordinary people find it increasingly hard to get to the end of the month without falling into debt, and where prices in the shops are visibly rising, wheeling out economists to explain that the electorate is stupid won’t work any more. The “Left’s” idea of a small increase in the minimum wage was, at best, a sticking-plaster applied to a small part of the problem, which is essentially the massive transfer of wealth towards the rich that has been going on for thirty years now, and from which the Inner Party has benefited substantially.

There is no sign that the “Left” understands this at all. The Socialists, for example, announced that among their non-negotiable conditions for entering into government was the repeal of a law passed last year which very timidly tried to start bringing a little bit of order to the chaos of uncontrolled immigration. But when you live essentially in a world of normative ideas, into which reality enters only by invitation, and then not often; and when you have an unshakeable belief in your own moral and intellectual superiority, this is what happens. Since the announcement of Barnier’s appointment, obscure “leftists” have been taking to the airwaves to proclaim that they will never, ever, agree to serve in his government, not that he would have asked them, and not as if anyone cared. (In fact, it is quite likely that a few more significant figures of the “Left” will finally make the supreme sacrifice of their moral principles and accept a nice government job: it wouldn’t exactly be the first time.)

Already I’ve heard people say that the “Left” will triumph in 2027, because Barnier’s government will fail. He may fail, but that doesn't mean that the “Left” will win. Indeed, it’s unclear to me how long the present electoral alliance will even survive. With no chance of bringing down the Barnier government by themselves, and sentenced to up to three years of impotence and marginalisation, with their agenda of the last fifteen years or so now fading and with nothing to replace it, they may not survive as an organised force for very long. (Indeed, the group may quite soon come apart because of Gaza.) Three years of making faces and hurling insults at the RN won’t achieve very much. Moreover, they have effectively castrated themselves by refusing to even talk to the RN. As a result, there are likely to be quite a few situations when the RN and the NFP (or whatever it then is) both oppose an initiative of a Barnier government. Under normal circumstances, they have a comfortable majority between them to defeat it.But because the “Left” cannot be seen to be voting with the RN, they will find some way of abstaining or ducking the issue and the law, or whatever, will be passed. This is not the behaviour of an adult political party. (I suppose that, if all else fails, indirect negotiations could be organised through the Swiss Embassy.) Which is all to say that a group of elite, middle-class vanguard parties pretending to be a party of the Left will last only until it is found out, as is happening in several countries now.

Finally, of course, there is the dreaded spectre of the horrible, terrible, no good, terrifyingly evil Extreme Right.™ In France and in Germany, and even to an extent in Britain, fears of a mass breakthrough have not been realised. But it is perhaps beginning to dawn on politicians that, nonetheless, these parties continue to gain support, and that as a result they gain seats in regional and national assemblies, and that they are then in a position to influence the running of the country. Efforts to stop this happening will no doubt continue, but in the end public dissatisfaction with governments is like water running downhill: it will find its own way around obstacles, and in turn the Party, and notably its “leftist” wing, will have to find an accommodation with it.

If Barnier successfully forms a government and begins to do things, then there is a possibility, no more, that some of this discontent will be appeased, because somebody is at least talking about issues that are important to ordinary people. And in turn, this may finally embolden some of what remains of the genuine Left to start taking an interest in everyday problems of ordinary people as well. From such a recognition to the rise of a genuinely populist left-wing party would at best be a long haul, but paradoxically the childish antics, both of Macron and of the “Left” may have brought it fractionally closer.