Michel Barnier: a Macronic miscalculation

Emmanuel Macron never was just any politician. Neither of the left nor the right, at least when he first ran for president, he refused to represent any existing party and longed to reshape the French political landscape, ideally in his image.

His grand experiment finally turned into a failure earlier this summer, when he called for a snap election and managed to strengthen both the left and the far right, while weakening his own hand. Two months of uncertainty followed but, earlier today, he managed to once again create unlikely friendships across the political spectrum.

Over at the Daily Express, headlines are already screeching that “Brexit basher” Michel Barnier, the new prime minister, will be a “nightmare for Starmer”. These aren’t quite the words the New European would use, but this columnist does agree that, on the whole, the appointment defies logic.

Barnier, as you may recall, has been around French politics for decades, and is staunchly of the right. Back in 2021, when he attempted to run for the leadership of Les Republicains, he called for all immigration to be suspended for three to five years, and signalled that he would want to discuss the Schengen Area with his EU counterparts.

This grandstanding got him nowhere in the end, which probably was for the best. Les Republicains are now, for all intents and purposes, a minor party in the National Assembly. A handful of them tried to offer a candidate for prime minister after the election, and quickly became a laughing stock. Barnier, on the other hand, is now about to run the French government.

It was a puzzling decision by Macron, to say the least, and can be interpreted in a number of ways. A good faith reading would be to assume that the president saw the state of the National Assembly and decided to turn to the man who negotiated Brexit, and is used to working around uneasy coalitions and buckets full of bad blood.

That would, however, be giving him too much credit. It is well known that Macron despises the left, despite having come into politics thanks to François Hollande. He refused to entertain the possibility of appointing Lucie Castets, a former civil servant and economist backed by the New Popular Front coalition.

It apparently didn’t matter that the left had come first in the elections he’d decided to call; she was the wrong choice, and so were all the other possible politicians on the country’s left. Bernard Cazeneuve, a figurehead of the centre-left and former PM was briefly considered, but similarly dropped. Some centrist figures were rumoured to be in the frame but also disappeared without a trace.

Instead, Macron went for a politician the far right could live with. It has been widely reported that the president kept in touch with Marine Le Pen in the days and weeks preceding the appointment. Her opinion mattered to him. The far right came third in the July elections but still, he chose to turn them into kingmakers.

It is a remarkable turn of events. For years, Macron told the French that voting for him was the only way to stop the Rassemblement National from getting into power. He managed to destroy both the traditional left and the traditional right, leaving only his party standing against Le Pen. Millions of people who loathed him did the right thing, election after election, and voted him in because they knew it was the right thing to do. In the end, he chose to betray them all and turn to the very enemy he’d sworn he would protect the country from.

It isn’t even clear that his gambit will work. Marine Le Pen doesn’t merely want to be a kingmaker; she still hopes to succeed Macron in a few years. Waving through a right-wing Prime Minister but remaining in opposition means that her party won’t be tainted by the failures of the incoming government, and will still be ready to pounce in 2027. If she wins, it will be Macron’s fault.

It is infuriating and unfair to millions of left-wing voters, but may just be the legacy he deserves. Emmanuel Macron; disrupter, boy king, abject failure.