France enters an unknown dimension. The motion of censure presented by the left-wing coalition against the Government of Michel Barnier has gone ahead with the vote of the extreme right, a clamp that puts an end to what the far-right leader Marine Le Pen has described as an “ephemeral Government”. Incidentally, the vote knocks down the Budget project, leaving the country less than a month away from a US-style ‘Government Shutdown’, since the French state cannot extend the Accounts or spend a single cent without there being some Current budgets.
With this result, the Government immediately ceases and becomes functional, without executive powers beyond managing ordinary affairs. The president, Emmanuel Macron, must now make a decision: appoint a technocratic government that will approve minimum budgets and manage the country until he can call elections in June; give in to Le Pen’s demands to approve budgets; or negotiate a government with left-wing forces, something the president already refused to do three months ago.
The biggest problem is that the National Assembly must approve some type of Budget before the end of the year. If a complete project that meets Brussels’ demands cannot be approved, at least an extension of the current ones should be approved, something that cannot be done automatically as in Spain. If not, the State would wake up on January 1 without the possibility of spending a single cent for anything: neither paying the salaries of civil servants, nor buying supplies for the offices, nor paying subsidies, nor paying contracts to companies, nor anything: a American-style ‘government shutdown’ without any precedent in French history.
Added to this is that Le Pen is waiting to find out if she will be disqualified for a crime of embezzlement, for which she went to trial on November 27. The sentence will be announced in March, and the candidate, who currently leads the polls, would like presidential elections to be called before that date, to keep the sentence suspended before it is carried out.
Three-way fight
The session has turned into a three-way battle. The left has criticized Macron for choosing to form a right-wing government tacitly supported by Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) instead of allowing the left, the first parliamentary force, to try to govern. “He has betrayed the republican front,” accused the socialist spokesman, Boris Vallaud. “It is an insult to the voters,” said the spokesman for La Francia Insumisa, Eric Coquerel.
From the extreme right, Le Pen has criticized Barnier for his “sectarianism” and “dogmatism.” “The budget we reject today not only fails to fulfill (the prime minister’s) promises. It has no direction or vision. It is a technocratic budget that continues downhill, careful not to touch the totem pole of uncontrolled immigration.” His ally, the former center-right leader Eric Ciotti, now in the orbit of the RN, accused the Government of making “socialist budgets” that “do not cut the State.”
And from the center, Macron’s allies have attacked both sides for joining an “alliance against nature” just to overthrow the Government. The president of the Republicans group, Laurent Wauquiez, has accused the promoters of the motion of opting for “chaos” instead of “responsibility.” “We are dancing on a volcano and they are asking us to take one more step towards the institutional instability that precipitated the agony of the Fourth Republic,” he stated. For his part, the former ‘Macronist’ prime minister Gabriel Attal has attacked Le Pen for rejecting “conservative” budgets to try to force early elections, and the socialists for leading the country to ungovernability at the hands of the extreme right. “There will not be time to approve budgets,” Barnier warned.
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