I once met an old lady in the delightful little town of Neuvic d’Ussel who had forgotten the fact that her next-door neighbour, Henri Queuille, had been prime minister on three different occasions. One can see why she might have failed to remember this. In the course of the French Fourth Republic (1946-1958), there were 16 prime ministers and 21 governments, none of which lasted much longer than a year. There were many small and poorly disciplined parties: several groupings described themselves as “Independents” and the mayor of Dijon even contested the 1951 election as an “independent Independent”.
Charles de Gaulle’s new constitution and the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 were designed to sweep all that away. The most significant powers were given to the president (elected for seven years) rather than a prime minister (dependent on the whim of parliament). In any case, parliament now had less power.
All of this has now fallen apart. François Bayrou was the second person to have been prime minister of France since President Emmanuel Macron unwisely held parliamentary elections last summer. Bayrou had to be sustained by a rickety coalition, a delicately balanced house of cards that he has now upset by calling a vote of confidence in his government. In doing so, he transformed a debate about a particular measure (a budget) into a decision on Bayrou’s government, the President, and the whole state of France.
Bayrou’s hero is a Fourth Republic prime minister, Pierre Mendès France, whose own government lasted for eight months. Modelling oneself on a man who never again held office after his resignation as prime minister in 1955 sounds like an odd strategy. But Mendès’s now famous phrase “to govern is to choose” underpinned Bayrou’s insistence on a confidence vote: it would force the political parties to make hard choices about public finances. A devout Catholic, Bayrou made a moral argument: piling up public debt places an impossible burden on future generations and creates a vicious circle as baby boomers are supported in their dotage by young taxpayers who cannot afford to start families. Mendès, too, was ostentatiously moral and, though he was a secularised Jew, he attracted particular admiration from progressive Catholics.
Yet the comparison with Mendès does not always work to Bayrou’s advantage. Mendès was serious and brave. He jumped from the window of a Vichy prison and made his way to London to join the Free French air force. This gave him a reserve of moral credit that no present-day politician can match. Mendès was a conservative (a liberal in the French sense of the word) in his attitude to public finances but progressive (a liberal in the Anglo-American sense of the word) in his attitude to other matters. The great achievement of his short-lived premiership was to extract France from Indo-China. And so even the student protestors of 1968 admired Mendès — rather as if stoned teenagers at Glastonbury were to chant “Oh George Osborne”. Bayrou has all the unpopularity that derives from his fiscal conservatism without the prestige that goes with a resistance record or support for decolonisation.
“Even the student protestors of 1968 admired Mendès — rather as if stoned teenagers at Glastonbury were to chant ‘Oh George Osborne’.”
Mendès was the real deal. The novelist François Mauriac admired both him and de Gaulle but suggested that the more uncompromising of the two when it came to hard choices was Mendès. Bayrou, by contrast, comes across as calculating and false. Some think that he knew that he could not win a vote of confidence and preferred a spectacular confrontation on an issue of principle that would allow him to present his defeat as an honourable one. More cynical observers point out that Bayrou has run for the presidency three times and suggest that he wishes to run again when Macron comes to the end of his second presidential term in 2027. Defeat now allows Bayrou to say “I told you so” about the economic state of France in two years’ time.
Bayrou’s demise reflects broader changes — some of them peculiar to France and some of them significant for most Western democracies. One major shift is in the nature of the French presidency itself. Since 2002, presidents serve five-year terms rather than seven, which has diminished their power to impose long-term stability. While De Gaulle and Mitterrand cultivated a monarchical mystique around their office, François Hollande ran in 2012 promising to make the presidency “normal” and fulfilled this banal ambition so well that he did not even try to run for a second term. Since 2017, Macron has worked hard to restore the prestige of the presidency — he has a taste for political theatre that owes much to de Gaulle. However, more than at any point since 1958, the presidency now seems a political office like any other. Some of those who voted against Bayrou were really voting against Macron and hope to force the President to resign before the end of his mandate.
Changing political communications have also contributed to a crisis in governance. Mendès used radio addresses to appeal directly to the French people over the heads of parliamentarians. Today, with no state monopoly of broadcasting and, even more importantly, since radio and television have lost their grip on public information, politicians like Bayrou resort to launching their own YouTube channels. Unsurprisingly, a 74-year-old man in a tie did not match the appeal of skateboarding cats or the Gen Z media-fluent president of le Rassemblement National, Jordan Bardella.
Macron’s own decision to found a new party — at first called En Marche and now called Renaissance — has disrupted the party system. En Marche enjoyed a period of spectacular electoral success, but its subsequent precipitous decline has not restored the fortunes of the parties that it displaced. The 577 deputies in the French parliament include members of 11 different groupings. No party comes close to commanding a majority of deputies and no politically feasible coalition could command such loyalty either.
In a strange way, bitter political hostilities were what once made France governable. In the Fourth Republic, there were times when the Communist Party got more votes than any other party — but the understandable desire to ensure that a group expressing unqualified admiration for Stalin should be kept out of power underwrote electoral alliances that brought the other parties together. More recently, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National aroused uncomfortable memories of Vichy and antisemitism. When Le Pen got into the second round of the 2002 presidential election (with just under 20% of the vote), other parties united to support the Gaullist Jacques Chirac under the unappealing but effective slogan “better the crook than the fascist”.
But today, some leaders of the mainstream Right — including the Gaullist former president Nicolas Sarkozy — treat the RN as a party like any other and say that they would not rule out an alliance with it. If there is a political untouchable in France, it is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-Left La France Insoumise. Mélenchon is often denounced for allegedly flirting with Islamism or antisemitism — though, in truth, his party’s policies would have seemed unexceptional on the French Left just a couple of decades ago. Mélenchon’s political isolation is attenuated by an unspoken alliance with the far-Right. Marine Le Pen and Mélenchon benefit from having each other as enemies and from a general sense of political crisis. There will be a kind of general strike — an attempt to “block everything” — on Wednesday. It seems to have originated with social media posts from the far-Right before being picked up by Mélenchon. Revealingly, the Rassemblement National, now torn between a desire to bring down the system and a desire to pose as a potential party of government, has slightly distanced itself from the upcoming protests.
All this means that France is getting dangerously close to the point at which protest parties that trade on denouncing the “system” have attained a level of support that means that the system cannot function without them. None of this would matter if the financial problems to which Bayrou alludes were not real. His opponents say that France’s problems are hardly more serious than those of some other countries (which is not saying much) or that France can still service her debt (which is obviously true until it stops being true). The stability of the Fifth Republic was founded partly on the rapid growth of the Trente Glorieuses. De Gaulle was never a great one for financial rigour (Mendès resigned from his provisional government in 1944 because of their disagreements on this) but he avoided awkward fiscal choices because state finances floated on rapid economic growth. It is unlikely that any future French government will get such an easy ride.
What happens now? Macron could dissolve parliament, but he is unlikely to repeat a stratagem that proved so disastrous for him last time. His numerous enemies want him to resign. But a Fifth Republic president has a right, some would say a duty, to serve until the end of his elected term. Only de Gaulle resigned before this. Pompidou died in office; Mitterrand served two full seven-year terms, though he was often in agony from the cancer that killed him just months after he left the Elysée Palace. In spite of his unpopularity with both the political class and the electorate, Macron has many strengths. He is still only 47 years old — more than a quarter of a century younger than Bayrou and younger than de Gaulle was in 1940 — and is possessed of extraordinary vigour and self-confidence. The very fact that the constitution prevents him from serving a third term gives him a kind of freedom: he does not have to care about opinion polls or maintaining alliances. However chaotic France’s domestic politics become, the president still controls a domaine reservé of foreign and defence policy, matters that have special importance because of Gaza and Ukraine.
When Italy faced similar circumstances in 2021, Mario Draghi formed a government of technocrats. Things are more complicated in France. The president who chooses the prime minister is himself both a technocrat (like most recent presidents, Macron is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration) and also, unlike his Italian counterpart, a party politician, who would find it hard to present himself as the arbiter of an apolitical solution. Probably Macron will find a prime minister who will stagger through government — obtaining a majority for particular measures without risking an overall vote of confidence. This will suit the centrist parties in the short term — because they defer a parliamentary election in which they would probably do badly. It will suit la France Insoumise and the Rassemblement National in the long term — because they will go into the next presidential election with all the advantages of being the anti-establishment parties.
The British should not be smug when surveying events across the Channel. Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced his Bayrou moment when his government proposed benefit cuts. Unlike Bayrou he did not dare make the vote into one of confidence, but this has not made the problem go away. Starmer seems to enjoy a large parliamentary majority, but the most striking novelty of the last election was the arrival of small protest parties — one of which might conceivably be the largest party in the next House of Commons. Labour looks less like a party than a sprawling alliance of political factions of the kind that would be familiar to students of Fourth Republic France.
It is hard to see how any prime minster, on either side of the Channel, can succeed with an electorate that rejects both public spending cuts and tax rises and with such a fissiparous party system. I suspect that the most pronounced political trend in the next decade or so will be the near certainty that incumbent parties cannot win elections. To paraphrase Mendès France, “to govern is to lose”.
