The French fascination with the guillotine has found a new focus over the last week. The man under the knife is France’s silver-haired prime minister, Michel Barnier, known for composure on previous scaffolds.
His political life could even be over this week, or possibly before Christmas, a prospect prompting ghoulish speculation about financial chaos, American-style government shutdown and unpaid salaries for the fifth of France’s work force on the public payrolls. That the country might soon be without a government is adding to the French malaise — a soup of industrial layoffs, strikes, demonstrating farmers, anemic growth and a yawning deficit.
The prospect of a government collapse sent French borrowing costs soaring relative to Germany’s last week, pushing them almost to the level of Greece’s. A showdown could come as early as Monday, when Mr. Barnier might try to force through a budget bill on government health care and other social spending.
Even Mr. Barnier, a veteran politician who negotiated a tough Brexit deal for the European Union and served four times as a minister in previous governments, concedes that he is living on borrowed time. The woman in control of the blade is Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right populist National Rally, which has more seats in the lower house of the French Parliament than any other party.
She doesn’t like Mr. Barnier’s budget of some $60 billion in tax increases and spending cuts. She doesn’t like his cuts to some medical reimbursements and increases in electricity fees — “violent, unjust, inefficient,” she told reporters on Tuesday — and she has suggested that her party will censure him if he forces his budgets through without a vote in Parliament. Mr. Barnier gave ground on the electricity fees on Thursday, but Ms. Le Pen said that was not enough.
Bypassing the lower house of Parliament — a French oddity, permitted under the Constitution — often provokes cries of autocracy and outrage among lawmakers. Led by the left, and joined by the far right, they will almost definitely put the government to a confidence vote.
Nearly as certain, that would mean the end for Mr. Barnier and his government, forcing him and his ministers to resign.
“To get out of this impasse, he’s counting on the National Rally,” said Sylvain Crépon, an expert on the French far right at the University of Tours. “So that means it is omnipotent. It’s the party that will save him.”
But, Mr. Crépon added, “I don’t think they want to save him.”
Ms. Le Pen has given every indication that she will not. So even before it has reached the power it has long sought — the French presidency — her National Rally is in the driver’s seat.
“I’m having more and more trouble seeing what could put a brake on their reaching power,” Mr. Crépon said. “If things continue as they are, with a government that can’t assert its authority, the National Rally could seem like the solution.”
Others in the party are more explicit than Ms. Le Pen. “If they remain deaf to us, they should pack their bags,” one of her party’s lawmakers in Parliament, Laurent Jacobelli, told the television station BFMTV.
That the Donald J. Trump-friendly National Rally calls the shots in France, which has so far resisted the pull of crony populism, is only half-acknowledged by the news media and by a political class that greeted the American election largely with alarm. Ms. Le Pen is currently on trial with her associates for misusing European Parliament money, and risks being convicted and barred from running for office.
But now, the prime minister is vulnerable, and Ms. Le Pen appears not in a good mood. “None of our ideas were included in the government’s budget, even hypothetically,” Ms. Le Pen, who often sounds aggrieved, wrote in an opinion article in Le Figaro last week. “We’re getting closer to a censure motion,” the Socialist lawmaker Jérôme Guedj said on French television.
What is it like to live under threat of imminent political death? At 73, Mr. Barnier feels he has little left to lose, friends and allies say. He has been exercising a stiff upper lip — a phrase whose French equivalent, sang froid, he invokes often.
“It’s useless to get irritated over such important questions,” he said like an admonishing grandfather during a debate in Parliament last week. “Please, keep your cool,” he told a visibly flustered member of Parliament in one recent encounter on the hustings. But that may not be enough to save him.
He was appointed in September by President Emmanuel Macron, who ignored parliamentary election results that were disastrous for his own party and allies, instead calling on Mr. Barnier, a figure from the traditional centrist right, to head the government. The leftist coalition that came out on top was furious. But Mr. Macron was exercising his constitutional prerogative.
Since then, the weakness of Mr. Barnier’s position has become clear. He is living “the hell of Matignon,” a phrase used by generations of political commentators to describe the difficulties of reigning from Matignon Palace, seat of the government, where a leader has some power, but hardly all of it.
The average tenure for a French prime minister is two and a half years, and Mr. Barnier seems likely to come in well under. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who held the office in the 2000s, has spoken of the bind: “Most days, you wake up feeling pretty lousy about what’s coming up,” he told a French television documentary.
Now, the far right feels scorned, the left dislikes Mr. Barnier on principle, and he is unloved by Mr. Macron’s centrist deputies because he proposes wringing more revenue out of the rich and out of 440 of France’s biggest companies, a violation of the French president’s pro-business creed.
In an interview on French television on Tuesday, Mr. Barnier smiled. He tried to project calm. “I’ve known since the 5th of September” — the day he was appointed — “that there would be a censure vote,” he said.
But, he noted: “Then what happens? There won’t be a budget. And there will be a serious storm in the financial markets.”
Those who know him say the calm is unfeigned. “He’s serene, because he feels free in this mission,” said Antoine Vermorel-Marques, a lawmaker who is close to Mr. Barnier. “He didn’t beg for the job.”
“He’s a battle-hardened negotiator who is used to diplomatic and political exchanges, and he’s never bowed down to populism or demagoguery,” Mr. Vermorel-Marques added. “He sat down for coffee with the Brexit negotiators and spoke of the need for calm. He needs to bring out that cup again.”
Mr. Barnier started his political life more than 50 years ago as a 22-year-old Gaullist councilor in his native Savoy, in France’s eastern mountains. He has methodically climbed the rungs of the political ladder — member of Parliament, regional president, senator, cabinet minister.
He is sometimes mocked for his phlegmatic demeanor but, with advancing age, is not perceived as a threat to others’ careers. Called “the French Joe Biden” by the news media, he finished well behind rivals in a presidential primary in 2021.
Pierre-Jérôme Hénin was his spokesman when Mr. Barnier was a minister. “He’s got an expression he invokes a lot: ‘the calm of old soldiers,’” Mr. Hénin said. “And he has that capacity. He doesn’t panic. He stays serene.”
“He’s used to putting people who hate each other around a table, and finding a solution,” he added.
In the television interview, Mr. Barnier rebuffed suggestions that he might quit. “Why should I resign?” he said. “I’m happy to do this work. I am of a certain age. You can see it. As long as I have the same capacity to be enthusiastic and indignant that I had 50 years ago, I’m ready to serve.”
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