French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday ruled out appointing Lucie Castets, the candidate of the New Popular Front (NFP), as prime minister in the name of “institutional stability”. After concluding his first round of political consultations, which will continue on Tuesday, he argued that a government of the leftist alliance, which brings together the radical left of La France Insoumise (LFI), socialists, ecologists and communists, “would be immediately censured” by the other parliamentary groups. The coalition won the largest number of seats after the second round of the early legislative elections on July 7, which plunged France into a deadlock, with a parliamentary chamber without an absolute majority.
“At the end of the consultations, the President of the Republic noted that a government based solely on the programme and parties proposed by the alliance with the largest number of deputies, the New Popular Front, would be immediately censured by all the groups represented in the National Assembly,” the Elysée said in a statement, which also called on the socialists, ecologists and communists to “cooperate with the other political forces.”
In recent days, the Macronist bloc, the traditional right and the far right have insisted that they would vote a motion of censure against an NFP government, not only for including ministers from the radical left of La France Insoumise, but for your program. The left-wing coalition proposesamong other measures, repealing Macron’s pension reform, which raised the retirement age from 62 to 64, and raising the minimum wage to 1,600 euros per month (Currently it is about 1,400).
In France, there is no vote of investiture for the head of the executive. The prime minister, appointed by the president, governs unless a majority of the Assembly overthrows him. The leaders of the NFP, which was created to confront the extreme right, reacted immediately. LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchonannounced that his party – the one with the most weight in the alliance – will present a motion to remove the president, as he had suggested more than a week ago. The procedure, however, has little chance of success, since it needs the support of two thirds of the deputies and two thirds of the senators.
The politician stepped up the pressure for Castets’ appointment over the weekend, asking the Macronist bloc and the traditional right whether there would be no veto on a left-wing government if his party agreed not to join it. “If they answer no, we can say that the rebellious ministers are simply a pretext, and that what you do not want is the programme” of the NFP, he said in a television interview.
The left-wing alliance claimed the keys to the government by winning 193 seats out of 577 in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament. The presidential bloc, made up of three centrist and centre-right parties, won 166; and the far-right National Rally, 126. Macron, however, believes that no one has won the election and that, as there is no bloc with a sufficient majority, a majority coalition must be formed with deputies from the centre, the left and the moderate right.
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The aim is to obtain a “solid majority”, that is to say, stable and “necessarily plural”, the president stressed. He had already indicated this in mid-July, in a letter to the French, and just before the Paris Olympics, in a television interview on 23 July.
“Democratic irresponsibility”
Marine Tondelier, the national secretary of the Green Party, has described Macron’s statement as “disgraceful”. “Calls for stability when the government has been dissolved without any consultation and when it refuses to accept the results of an election in which the French people have turned out in large numbers are a dangerous act of democratic irresponsibility,” she said. on social network X.
The national secretary of the Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, has said that he will not attend the new consultations organised by Macron. “They do not want things to change, there is no point in us going,” he said in an intervention on BFMTV, in which he also called for “a large popular mobilisation”. A few hours earlier, the leaders of the NFP had announced that they would not return to the polls. meet with Macron unless it is to discuss a Government with its candidate, Lucie Castets, at the head.
The French president resumed on Monday the political consultations that he began on Friday and which, according to the Elysée, will conclude with the announcement of a prime minister. Pressure is mounting to appoint a government now, after the last legislative elections left the country in limbo, with a parliamentary chamber divided into three blocs, all far from the absolute majority of 289 seats.
Macron began his round of talks on Friday with the NFP, followed by members of the presidential bloc and the conservative Republicans (LR) party, which won 47 seats. On Monday, it was the turn of the National Rally (RN), which confirmed to him that it would censure “any left-wing government”. After the meeting, the party leader, Marine Le Pen, accused the president of being responsible for the “political chaos” that the country is experiencing. The president also met with RN ally Éric Ciotti, who belongs to the most right-wing wing of LR, with the president of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, and with his counterpart in the Senate, Gérard Larcher.
The Constitution does not set a deadline for the head of state to appoint a prime minister. But time is running out. The government has been in office since 16 July and the situation is beginning to generate a certain amount of impatience among the population. The Paralympic Games in Paris start on Wednesday and France must approve a budget for 2025 and present it to the lower house of parliament by the first Tuesday in October at the latest.
The end of the round of consultations coincided with the return –the beginning of the school year– of Medef, the French employers’ association. “The heads of companies are worried and we must not make them nervous with a blurred political situation that lasts too long,” said its President, Patrick Martin.
The political puzzle is not yet over in France, where the coalition culture is not well established. Compromises will, however, be necessary, as new legislative elections cannot be called for another year.
LR Conservatives [hermanados con el PP] offered a “legislative pact” to the presidential coalition at the end of July. But the group’s president in the Assembly, Laurent Wauquiez, He ruled out a “government coalition”“We are independent and we will remain so,” he insisted. Together with the centrists (166) they would surpass the NFP, but would still be far from an absolute majority.
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