The appointment after forty-nine days: France finally has a prime minister

On 5 September, France finally got a prime minister, seven weeks after the voters delivered the hung parliament that made the appointment so hard. Michel Barnier, 73, a veteran of the conservative right, a former minister and European commissioner, and the man who negotiated the Brexit withdrawal agreement for the European Union, accepted the post from Emmanuel Macron, who had spent the summer shuffling candidates and watching them fall to the arithmetic of the National Assembly. The country that had expected, in June, to be governed by the left received instead the oldest conservative in French public life, with no majority, no coalition and no clear mandate, and the appointment was the kind of solution that postpones the problem.

The numbers explain everything. The elections of June and July produced a chamber split into three blocs of roughly equal size, the left alliance with the largest share, the far right of Marine Le Pen close behind, and Macron’s centre reduced to a minority, and no combination of two blocs adds up to a stable majority unless the far right is included, which the centre has ruled out and the left refuses to contemplate. Every government in such a chamber is a minority government, dismissible at any moment by a motion of censure that the far right and the left would both sign, for opposite reasons. Barnier inherits that chamber, and his name, chosen in part because his age and record make him harder to attack, is the least fragile part of the arrangement.

The appointment was, in the sharpest sense, Macron’s admission of defeat. He had spent the summer arguing that the centre could find partners on its own terms, floating names that would have signalled a grand coalition, and he ended by choosing a man of the old right, who owes his selection less to any vision than to the fact that Le Pen’s party did not immediately threaten to topple him. The far right’s tolerance is the unspoken foundation of the new government, and it is the kind of foundation that shifts. Barnier’s first statements, on migration, on order, on the authority of the state, were written, in effect, for the audience on the far right, and the government’s survival will depend on whether that audience chooses to keep it alive.

The country itself is in a strange state to receive him. France was governed by a caretaker all summer, and the Olympics were carried out with no government at all. The budget that must be presented by the autumn, the deficit that has run past five per cent, the pension reform the left wants reversed and the right wants kept, all of it now lands on a prime minister whose party controls perhaps a tenth of the assembly, and the arithmetic of survival will govern every decision he makes. The man who spent four years negotiating with twenty-seven capitals now faces the harder negotiation: with three hundred factions inside one chamber.

The Fifth Republic was designed, in 1958, to end the instability of the Fourth, and for sixty years it largely succeeded, because the presidency and the two-round ballot produced majorities. The elections of 2024 broke the machine, and every device tried since, the dissolved assembly, the summer of caretakers, the appointment of a man from the old right, has been an attempt to make it run without the fuel it was built for. Barnier is that attempt, wearing a tie. He may last a month, or a year; the republic, which has survived worse, will survive him either way. But the polite fiction that France is governable by its old machinery has been given its clearest test yet, and the test has a date attached to it: the budget, the autumn, the first censure vote.