New French government faces unlikely censorship

Photo: Thibault Camus Associated Press French Prime Minister Michel Barnier at the National Assembly on October 1.

Boris Bachorz – Agence France-Presse in Paris

Published at 0:41

• Europe

The new French government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier (right) faces its first motion of censure in Parliament on Tuesday, presented by the left, which it should survive despite its lack of a majority, the far right refusing to support this text.

A month after his surprise nomination in early September by President Emmanuel Macron, Mr. Barnier, 73 years old and veteran of the French right, will face from 3 p.m. (11 a.m. in Quebec) in the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament, a motion of censure defended by a coalition of left-wing parties bringing together socialists, environmentalists and the radical left.

This coalition, the New Popular Front (NFP), came out on top in the early legislative elections called by Mr. Macron last summer, without however obtaining a majority absolute.

She has since criticised the head of state for not having really given her a chance to form a government, Mr Macron having preferred to create a coalition that is clearly more marked on the right.

The Barnier government, “in its composition and its orientations, is a negation of the result of the last legislative elections”, affirm the 192 NFP deputies supporting the motion of censure.

But the parliamentary left seems far from being able to gather the 289 votes required – the absolute majority – in the National Assembly to overthrow the government. A very rare event in France, which last occurred in 1962.

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Especially since the National Rally (RN, far right), the party best represented in the Assembly with 126 elected representatives, has already made it known that it would not support this initiative.

“I think the situation is serious enough not to censor this government in advance. “We're going to, I was going to say, give the product a chance,” joked RN MP Laure Lavalette last week, whose party is thus inaugurating its new position as arbiter of the Assembly, and to a certain extent that of maker or unmaker of government.

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Taxes and immigration

Some elected officials from the presidential camp could also vote for censure, but without swinging the vote. For some, it is a question of punishing a government that is too far to the right on security and immigration issues.

Others are hostile to Mr. Barnier's intention to temporarily increase taxes for the most profitable companies and the richest French people, while compulsory deductions in France are already among the highest among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) member countries.

This “exceptional” effort will represent a third of the debt reduction desired by the new government, with the remaining “two-thirds” to come from a reduction in public spending – which is, this time, provoking the ire of the left.

The new government intends to gradually reduce the public deficit, which risks exceeding 6% of GDP this year, well above the 3% ceiling that the countries of the European Union have collectively set for themselves.

“The real sword of Damocles is our colossal financial debt […] which, if we are not careful, will place our country on the brink of a precipice,” Mr. Barnier justified last Tuesday before the Assembly.

He had then also announced a tightening of migration and integration policies, considering that these were no longer controlled in a “satisfactory manner”, an assertion at the heart of the program of the French extreme right and acclaimed by its growing electorate.

On Monday, the new French Finance Minister, Antoine Armand, tried to convince his EU counterparts of Paris’s budgetary seriousness at a meeting in Luxembourg.

The stated objective is to reduce the deficit from 6.1% this year to 5% next year, before dropping below 3% by 2029, two years later than promised by the previous government.

France’s 10-year borrowing rate exceeded Spain’s on the debt market at the end of September, a first in almost 18 years.