When will the epilogue come? Nearly two months after the legislative elections, no white smoke was emerging from the Élysée Palace on Tuesday morning, where the consultations intended to lead to the choice of a consensual prime minister are dragging on, causing consternation among the French.
Seven years after Emmanuel Macron came to power, “there is a feeling of IV in the air in Francee “Republic”, this unstable constitutional era which marked the post-war period in France, criticizes the conservative daily on Tuesday The Figaro.
Adding to the confusion, the former centrist Prime Minister Edouard Philippe made official on Tuesday evening his candidacy for… the 2027 presidential election. While affirming that he would support until then “any Prime Minister chosen in a political space that goes from the conservative right to social democracy.”
France has been governed for nearly 50 days by an executive that has resigned, something never seen since the end of the Second World War.
“It’s time to finally have a prime minister,” mocks columnist Serge July in a post from the left-wing newspaper Releasefor whom “this institutional and political impasse and the manifest impotence of the president risk at any moment taking the unknown form of a national revolt.”
Left and right
After having dismissed the option of Lucie Castets, the candidate proposed by the left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front (NFP), Emmanuel Macron initially saw the prospect of rallying the Republicans in a coalition recede.
On Monday, however, the French president spoke with two “prime ministerial candidates” from these two sides: a former left-wing head of government who broke ranks with the Socialist Party, Bernard Cazeneuve, and a former right-wing minister who is rather critical of his camp, Xavier Bertrand.
The head of state continues to “test” these two hypotheses, in other words to verify whether a government led by one or the other could avoid immediate parliamentary censure, his entourage told AFP on Tuesday.
A third name, unknown to the general public, also emerged on Monday as a possible prime minister: that of Thierry Beaudet, the president of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE), a profile from civil society, with a rather left-leaning sensibility.
Some sources even assured in the evening that the matter was settled.
On Tuesday morning, sources within the Republicans confirmed discussions with the head of state regarding the appointment of Xavier Bertrand, to which the party’s leaders would probably not oppose, when they had previously indicated that they ruled out being part of a government coalition.
“Political chicanery”
Nearly two months after the dissolution of the National Assembly, following a rout of his camp in the European elections, Emmanuel Macron faces “three blocs, two of which are hostile to him”, the newspaper summarises. The Parisian.
The left came out on top ahead of the presidential camp in the June-July legislative elections, with the far right in third place.
If the French “were not angry during the summer to come together around the Olympic Games rather than to divide themselves over political quibbles […]they could quickly lose their indulgence” towards the head of state “if they have the feeling” that he is unable to get out of “the impasse into which he has plunged all by himself, with the dissolution”, continues the general daily.
Time is running out to form a full government, with the 2025 budget due by October 1 at the latest.
Black clouds
However, bad news is piling up on the economic front. More dynamic than expected, local government spending could worsen France’s public deficit by 16 billion euros in 2024, the Ministry of the Economy worried on Monday, in a letter addressed to parliamentarians and consulted by AFP.
The tax revenue forecasts, already lowered by “nearly 30 billion euros” in the spring, could also not be achieved “given the change in the composition of growth, which is less favorable to tax revenues,” this document points out.
At the end of July, the European Union formally launched procedures for excessive public deficits targeting seven member states, including France, a first since the suspension of its budgetary rules in 2020 with the coronavirus crisis.
France, whose debt reaches 110% of GDP, has been in an excessive deficit procedure most of the time since the creation of the euro at the turn of the 2000s. However, it exited it in 2017.
Today, the French public deficit is estimated at 5.5% of GDP, while the EU stability pact limits it to 3% and the debt to 60% of the GDP of a member state.