The fall of Macron’s government should ring alarm bells in UK

The fall of Macron’s government should ring alarm bells in UK



Posted by theipaper

5 comments

  1. French President Emmanuel Macron faces one of the trickiest moments of his presidency after his prime minister, François Bayrou, was toppled in a bruising confidence vote in the National Assembly, leaving the French leader with no easy path to form a stable government.

    The defeat of Bayrou, Macron’s fourth prime minister in barely two years, underscored the depth of the gridlock since the president gambled on dissolving parliament last year. Macron’s centrist bloc has been stranded without a majority, while the far-right and the far-left smell blood, demanding new parliamentary elections. 

    The numbers in the National Assembly were unforgiving: 364 out of the 577 deputies voted against his government, and only 194 backed him. 

    Now Macron must decide whether to appoint yet another ally to the Hôtel de Matignon, reach out to the Socialists for an unlikely coalition, or risk new snap elections that could catapult Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National into power. Each option is fraught with risk.

    Bayrou himself went down swinging in his valedictory address to the National Assembly, saying he was ready to die on the hill of an unpopular cost-cutting budget. With debt at nearly 114% of GDP and deficits far above the European Union ceiling, he repeated his mantra from the past quarter century that France desperately needs to balance its books or face a fiscal vortex. 

  2. Labour has a safe majority unlike the former French PM, surely that insulates us against such instability for a while yet?

  3. >He attacked what he called the “easy solutions” of left and right alike, dismissing both the scapegoating of immigrants and the idea that the rich could alone bear the burden.

    Sounds familiar, both in the UK and elsewhere.

  4. Macron is an interesting case of a government who remains in power not because anyone likes him, but because the Left and the Far Right hate each other more than that they hate him. Obviously it’s a very weak grip to power.

  5. Easy solutions like taking away hard fought statutory holidays for workers? Piss off.

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