Unable to agree on a candidate for prime minister, the French left is struggling to overcome its differences, while the current prime minister, Gabriel Attal, and President Emmanuel Macron united their troops on Monday at the start of a decisive week.
Having come out on top in the second round of early legislative elections on July 7, the New Popular Front, the coalition of left-wing parties, has still not reached an agreement on a government team.
The name of Huguette Bello, president of the regional council of La Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, proposed by the communists last week, did not convince the Socialist Party (PS). The lead of this official close to the party La France insoumise (LFI, radical left) was abandoned during the weekend.
“I am so angry about the face we are showing,” environmentalist Sandrine Rousseau despaired on X on Monday.
The strongest tensions are between the Insoumis and the Socialists, the two main groups of the NFP fighting for leadership on the left in the new Assembly.
“Is the Socialist Party playing for time to let the New Popular Front break up and abandon the program?” accused LFI in a press release.
Previously, the movement’s coordinator Manuel Bompard had castigated “the systematic opposition, the blockages, the vetoes” of the PS “on all the candidacies”.
“Nothing has been blocked,” retorted the first secretary of the PS Olivier Faure, the official candidate of the socialists for the post of head of government.
“No discussion”
To get out of the rut, Olivier Faure proposed on the France 2 channel to “widen” the prism to “someone from the outside”, “perhaps from civil society”, a possibility also mentioned by certain environmentalists.
But the Insoumis dismissed this hypothesis on the grounds that it lacked “guarantees” for “the implementation of the New Popular Front program.”
And LFI leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon raised his voice: “We demand a single candidate for the presidency of the National Assembly and will not resume any discussion on anything else until this is settled,” wrote the rebellious leader on X.
The left is playing big in this election: part of the presidential camp has been trying for several days to build an alternative majority to the NFP for this key position in the Assembly, which the outgoing president Yaël Braun-Pivet intends to keep.
An agreement with the right, for example, could allow the presidential bloc to overtake the left in number of votes.
Attal soon to resign
The question of the Republican Front against the National Rally (RN, far right), which the left would like to pursue in the National Assembly by depriving the RN of any position of responsibility, is also one of the topics of the week.
But several Macronist executives, including Ms Braun-Pivet, are opposed to it.
The RN, which came third in the elections, has some 143 out of 577 deputies with its supporters.
This issue of the Republican Front was on the agenda of a meeting on Monday of the Renaissance group, officially renamed “Together for the Republic” around its new president Gabriel Attal.
While waiting for the new legislature to be set up, Emmanuel Macron received the party leaders of the presidential camp at midday, including Stéphane Séjourné (Renaissance) and Marc Fesneau, representative of MoDem president François Bayrou.
At this stage, Mr. Attal remains prime minister, as long as Emmanuel Macron does not accept his resignation.
This should be the case “Tuesday or Wednesday”, according to Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. The current team would, however, remain in place for a certain time, particularly during the very sensitive period of the Olympic Games, to manage “current affairs”. A Council of Ministers, scheduled for Tuesday at 11:30 a.m., could pave the way for this new configuration.
In the midst of the political uncertainty, one thing is certain for the future government team: it will recover public finances in the red. In a thick report presented on Monday morning, the Court of Auditors draws up a worrying assessment.
The need to reduce debt is an “imperative” which “must be shared” by all political forces, warned its first president Pierre Moscovici.