Breaking News: The Second Half
Macron is heading for a 2022 election for another five year term. He believes he has eighteen months to accomplish something solid before the campaign takes over. His agenda seems stalled. His party was just walloped in the nationwide municipal elections on June 28. So what should he do? He has now done it. He has made the decision to replace Prime Minister Édouard Philippe with Jean Castex. More on Castex below.
The 2020 municipal elections of France–the elections of the mayors and municipal councils of all 4800 or so towns and villages, from Paris to Collioure–are divided, this year, into the pre- and post-Covid era. The first round of elections was held as scheduled on March 15, just before the country shut down. The second round was held on June 28, after the country had opened up again.
Édouard Philippe, Macron’s now ex-prime minister, was elected as Mayor of Le Havre (Le Havre), a seaport in Normandy, population approximately 170,000. It is considered a major triumph for him personally and the only bright spot for Macron’s party, even though Philippe, a member of Les Républicains, has never joined La République en Marche. He thanked his supporters (and endured some heckling) , expressed his gratitude, and affirmed his seriousness about the responsibility he had just been given. His victory, at 59%, was up from the first round and likely reflects his rise in popularity by his handling of the pandemic:
But he ran as Prime Minister . . . . ? So why would he want to be mayor of a city of middling size?
We’ll start at the beginning of a drama that saw Macron’s LREM, Jadot’s Greens (EELV), Le Pen’s National Rally, Jacob’s Les Républicains, Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, and nobody’s Socialists (party secretary is Olivier Faure), having at each other in arenas throughout the country. It is frequently said that local issues drive the races, but in fact they also have national implications.
The municipales constitute a referendum, of sorts, on the party in power, one of the few checks on the five-year terms of president and National Assembly. A dramatic loss of towns and cities, as the Socialist Party suffered in 2014, becomes a media event, a part of the chorus of failure and unpopularity that was imposed on President François Hollande then, and is starting in regard to Macron now. Further, the strength of a party in the presidential and National Assembly elections depends on their local “rootedness” in the various regions and on their ability, especially in larger cities, to stage rallies and recruit volunteers, the militants, for the candidates. The mayor and some city council members provide the 500 parrainages, the signatures that are required for running for the presidency. Finally, the mayors and city councils have the power to elect the Senate.
The Senate is composed of 348 members with six year terms. Half are elected every three years, not by direct suffrage but by only about 150,000 of these elected local officials. Therefore the results of the municipals are significant in determining the composition of the upper house. (See The Local, September 16, 2014). The elections of half the Senate in September, 2017, were acknowledged as a disappointment for Macron, in spite of his great victory that year in the National Assembly. They had hoped to win 40 to 50 Senators of those up for election and managed only to put 23 in office, for a total of 28, with 171 seats for Les Républicains. Gerard Larcher (LR) saw it as a check on Macron, who had perhaps been too triumphant in that year: “Voters clearly showed they wanted a parliamentary counterweight, which is in my view vital to a balanced democracy” (Reuters, September 24, 2017. Losing the municipals thus can ensconce the opposition in power in the Senate for six year terms–a sort of lagging reprimand to the dominant party, and a potential obstacle.
Macron had wished to win outright a respectable number of municipal elections, and particularly to gain some splashy victories in the cities. The cruel map of victory, below.
And now that Édouard Philippe has provided the only bright spot for the government, Macron has just fired him as Prime Minister. . . . ?
It all has to do with the coming of the “second half” of the five-year term (though Macron is about nine months beyond the actual halfway point).
French presidents–at least the good ones–like to think of their quinquennat in terms of a program, a linked set of steps to achieve a coherent goal, and for Macron that goal has been the increase of the competitiveness of the French economy. This has generally been understood, in recent French politics, as lowering the “cost of labor” by deregulation and by a “softening” of the amount of social contributions–to health care, retirement, family assistance–that employers pay into the system for each employee. Thus unburdened, it is believed, industries will expand and hire more people. (Or maybe they will simply pay big dividends to their stockholders.) This vision is, in effect, a part of the supply-side economics that have driven the policies of the French government for several decades.
And Macron has acted as he said he would, with several laws that he and his Prime Minister, Édouard Philippe, drove through in the first year and a half of his term–the labor law, the abandonment of the solidarity tax (ISF) on the wealthy, the beginning of retirement reform. Then there was to be an environmental measure, a behavior-shaping measure, by raising the cost of fuel. This carbon tax would presumably force people to take public transport (if any was available) or to drive a more fuel-efficient car (if they could afford one).
Enter the Gilets Jaunes, beginning in late 2018. And then, a year later, a year lost, and just as he was attempting in earnest to pass retirement reform, a massively unpopular and very complicated measure–at that point, COVID-19 hit.
So how does Macron, his party defeated in the municipals, get back the initiative? There have been numerous rumors in the journals of dramatic actions, to shake things up and mark a new start. And now they have happened. Who called it correctly?
Already in early June, the newspaper Marianne published a secret note from Gilles Le Gendre, president of the LREM group in the National Assembly, which provided suggestions for remaking the Ministry. First of all, he proposed to dump Prime Minister Édouard Philippe. (Philippe’s circle confirmed that there was a “50-50 chance” that this would happen.) Le Gendre suggested in replacement Bruno Le Maire, currently the Minister of the Economy–”lacking in charisma,” he wrote, but able to make the Ministers work together. Le Gendre was outraged by the publishing of the contents of his secret note, and asserted that his statements were taken out of context, that there had been “un hacking” of his phone. In fact, however, he seems to have circulated the list fairly widely; Marianne had little trouble getting it. Both Macron and Philippe were described as “annoyed” by this, Macron at the idea of the appearance of a plot against his first minister, and Philippe for obvious reasons; the first post-note encounter between Philippe and Le Gendre was “glacial” (Marianne, June 10, 2020).
On June 11, Le Figaro put forward some wild possibilities. In order of least risk, they included a new prime minister, a replacement of Édouard Philippe and with him, likely a number of the current Ministers: that shuffling is going on now, and is a standard response to crisis: indeed, after the defeat of the Socialist Party in the municipal elections of 2014, François Hollande changed his prime minister, without however changing any of his policies. More uncertain would be a dissolving of the National Assembly and a call for new elections, in order to obtain a mandate. This act would make little sense, in context: even though there have been defections by LREM deputies from the majority group, Macron still has 288 out of the absolute majority of 289 he needs in the Assembly, and the MoDem alliance (a right-center party) puts him well over the top. The boldest act of all would be to resign, and then to run again. There is no automatic vice president to take over in the French system; the president of the Senate holds the interim position, but a new election needs to be held within 20-25 days after the departure of the president. Macron, according to “those close” to the president, believes that he would win again; no one else has the stature, or would be capable of building enough of a coalition, in that brief time.
There has been a vacancy twice in the Fifth Republic: De Gaulle resigned in 1969, after the loss of a referendum; Pompidou died in 1974. But no one has ever resigned in order to run again, not even de Gaulle, though it’s a very Gaullist thing to do, and thus might well appeal to Macron. The information office at the Élysée Palace said that nothing was off the table, then went back and denied that resignation had ever been an option, nor had it even been mentioned (Le Figaro, June 11, 2020).
But it was L’Express on July 1, just after the second round of elections, who got it right. They gleaned some names from “those close” to the president. Macron, they reported, was deciding what he would do for the rest of his term. He was consulting widely, but confiding in no one. Their sources had given them some names, including two women: Florence Parly, Minister of the Armies; Valérie Pécresse, president of the Ile-de-France region, former Deputy, former holder of ministerial posts, and former member of the LRs. Also rumored were Jean-Louis Borloo, former UDF leader (the kinder, gentler LRs), and former Ecology Minister; and Michel Barnier, the Brexit negotiator, deeply involved in EU affairs.
And Jean Castex, described as haut fonctionnaire (high-ranking functionary), whose cv shows that he has indeed done many haut-fonctionnaire things. Their sources were good (L’Express, July 1, 2020).
He worked for Sarkozy and is a member of Les Républicains, so there will be no sharp turn to the left. And one suspects that Sophie Pedder, chief of the Paris bureau of The Economist, may have guessed the Macron’s motive.
More to come.
