In his first appearance before France’s fractured lower house of Parliament, Prime Minister Michel Barnier pleaded on Tuesday with lawmakers to work with his government on tackling the country’s most pressing issues, first and foremost a looming budget crisis.
Over roughly 90 minutes, Mr. Barnier laid out a road map for his fragile government with many vague promises, including slashing government spending and temporarily raising taxes on the country’s biggest and most profitable companies and on its wealthiest citizens.
Mr. Barnier, a veteran right-wing politician who was appointed by President Emmanuel Macron last month, must contend with a lower house of Parliament dominated by three main blocs but with no clear majority.
He acknowledged that tenuous position but beseeched lawmakers to overcome France’s aversion to working across party lines.
“We need more listening, respect and dialogue,” Mr. Barnier said, addressing the 577 newly elected lawmakers in the packed National Assembly. Many from the hard-left France Unbowed party jeered and interrupted him as he spoke. “Compromise is not a swear word,” he added later.
Mr. Barnier is in what many consider an impossible position. Snap parliamentary elections this summer yielded no clear winner. Instead, the lower house is made up of three main blocs with diametrically differing positions: a delicate coalition of conservatives and centrists who support Mr. Barnier; a left-wing alliance called the New Popular Front that is adamant on ousting him; and a far-right bloc led by the National Rally in the influential position of arbiter.
“We won these elections,” said Mathilde Panot, the top lawmaker for France Unbowed party, part of the left-wing alliance, whose members held up voting cards in protest at the beginning of Mr. Barnier’s speech. She vowed to topple Mr. Barnier’s cabinet with a no-confidence motion.
But the New Popular Front does not have enough votes to oust Mr. Barnier without the support of the nationalist, anti-immigration National Rally party, putting the fate of Mr. Barnier’s cabinet in its hands.
“Your presence on these benches is due exclusively to the complicity of the far right, which is holding you hostage,” Ms. Panot said.
Marine Le Pen, the National Rally’s longtime leader, said the party would give Mr. Barnier “a chance, however small” of governing, but would not hesitate to topple him if he crossed certain “red lines,” like failing to pass a restrictive immigration law next year.
“We will only judge you on your acts,” she told lawmakers.
Among a long list of measures and promises, Mr. Barnier said he was open to tweaking Mr. Macron’s pension reform, without rolling back the rise in the legal retirement age. He vowed to build more prisons and better enforce sentences, declared mental health as a top priority and promised that key social rights like abortion and gay marriage would remain untouched.
The government, he vowed, would have as its “only compass, the general interest of the country.”
His first order of business will be to present the budget, which is needed to rein in ballooning debt and deficit. France is expecting its deficit to reach 6 percent of economic output in 2024, up from a recent forecast of 5.6 percent. The country’s debt load has also ballooned to three trillion euros (about $3.3 trillion), or more than 110 percent of gross domestic product, the highest ratio in Europe after Greece and Italy.
“If nothing is done, we will be in an even worse situation,” said Mr. Barnier, who promised to bring the deficit down next year but offered few details about his promised tax hikes and spending cuts.
Mr. Barnier is a member of the Republicans, France’s main conservative party, which came in a distant fourth in the elections, further complicating his job.
“In any political system, legitimacy is the key to power,” said Vincent Martigny, a professor of political science at the University of Nice, Côte d’Azur. “He has none.”
The cabinet itself has already shown signs of fractures. Its centrist members, several of whom belong to Mr. Macron’s party, are reluctant to roll back tax cuts from the past seven years, and are uncomfortable with the far right’s influence. Last week, Mr. Barnier quickly rebuked his economy minister, a centrist who belongs to Mr. Macron’s party, for implying that he wouldn’t work with the far-right on the budget.
Bruno Retailleau, a pugnacious conservative who had been the top Republican senator and is now interior minister, has also drawn ire from centrists with a media blitz of inflammatory comments on crime and immigration — including by arguing, before backtracking slightly, that the rule of law was “neither intangible nor sacred” when it came to drastically toughening certain rules.
Debates over immigration have grown particularly heated in recent days after the authorities identified the main suspect in the killing of a 19-year-old student in the Paris area as a Moroccan immigrant who had served time for a rape conviction. The death prompted lawmakers to hold a minute of silence before Mr. Barnier’s speech.
The 22-year-old suspect had been ordered to leave France after his release from prison but was still in the country because of a series of complex rules and missteps that delayed his deportation. Mr. Retailleau and others on the right and far right have seized upon the case as proof that lax immigration rules were putting the French at risk.
Mr. Barnier promised to streamline the asylum process and make it easier to detain people for longer in order to deport them. But he also urged parties to treat the issue with “dignity and gravity rather” rather than weaponizing individual cases for political gain.
His fate was in Parliament’s hands, he repeated in his speech. Other parties, eyeing the 2027 presidential election — or even new snap elections next year — might have little interest in helping him.
“The best chance of that government is that nobody wants to do that job,” said Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist. “So he will be criticized, threatened, harassed constantly,” she said of Mr. Barnier. “But he might survive.”
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