France: A new government, marked on the right and already fragile

France finally has a government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Michel Barnier, who will have to impose his right-wing and already criticized team.

Barely announced by the Secretary General of the Elysée Alexis Kohler on Saturday evening, the new team, composed of 39 members, is already threatened by the opposition. The government “signs the return of Macronism” and “has no future”, declared Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, the far-right party that plays the role of arbiter in the Assembly. The leader of the radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose movement La France insoumise (LFI) is part of the majority left-wing coalition in the Assembly, called for “getting rid of the government as soon as possible”.

The new executive was born in pain, after fifteen days of negotiations led by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, himself appointed after incredible political maneuvers. The team’s color leans clearly toward the right, the political family from which Michel Barnier comes. The only “catch” from the left is the new Minister of Justice, Didier Migaud, a former socialist who has withdrawn from active politics and is unknown to the general public.

President Emmanuel Macron, who plunged the country into uncertainty by deciding to dissolve the National Assembly on June 9, following his defeat in the European elections, gave his approval to the new team after final negotiations on Saturday.

The Barnier government will have to succeed in asserting itself in the Assembly resulting from the early legislative elections, fragmented into three irreconcilable blocs: the left, which came first in the elections but is absent from the government, the Macronist centre-right and the far right, in the position of arbiter.

The first Council of Ministers will be held on Monday afternoon. Mr. Barnier plans to make his general policy speech on October 1st. And the first, extremely urgent, task of his government will be to get the budget adopted, at a time when France is faced with an abysmal debt and targeted by a European procedure for excessive deficit.

Among the prominent figures in the new government, the new Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, is already a bogeyman for the left and centrists, including Macronists.

A figure of an inflexible liberal-conservative right, a champion of “order”, “authority” and “firmness”, Mr. Retailleau intends in particular to implement a tough policy on immigration, a subject of concern to the French which regularly inflames the political class.

On the “Macronists” side, centrist Jean-Noël Barrot was appointed to Foreign Affairs. Former Minister Delegate for European Affairs, this young official – 41 years old – will have to assert himself quickly and make himself known on an explosive international scene, marked by two major conflicts, in Ukraine and the Middle East. The Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu, loyal to the Head of State, is one of the few to keep his post and his ministry will be one of the only ones to benefit from a sharply increased budget in this context of international crises.

Rachida Dati, a divisive figure on the right, also retains her portfolio as Minister of Culture.

The left, which came out on top in the legislative elections, has been denouncing for weeks a “stolen election” and, like the radical left MEP Manon Aubry, has castigated a team which, according to it, will be “on a drip from the extreme right”.

Environmentalists and LFI (La France insoumise, radical left) activists demonstrated Saturday in several cities in France at the call of associations, student, environmental and feminist organizations, against the “Macron-Barnier” government.

“I’m here because it doesn’t match what we voted for. The Prime Minister represents a party that got almost nothing in the elections. I’m worried and angry: what’s the point of voting?”, said a Parisian protester, Violette Bourguignon, 21, a film student.

The head of state has installed at Matignon “a hard-right, anti-social, anti-migrant Prime Minister, with a homophobic past and who will only be able to govern with the permanent agreement of Marine Le Pen”, we can read in the call to demonstrate. LFI intends to “increase popular pressure” after a first day of protest on September 7.