Will the Barnier government last until Christmas? “I don’t know how much time I have ahead of me, replies the Prime Minister. This depends on a possible coalition of opposites in the National Assembly. » The sentence, slipped into his closing speech at the Congress of Mayors in Paris this Thursday, made the room laugh. The advent of this “coalition of opposites” and the possibility of a fall of its government, just three months after its constitution, have never been so close.
This perspective is not new. We have already forgotten it, so much practice has become commonplace since 2022, but Michel Barnier suffered a first motion of censure in his general policy speech. Rejected, the deputies of the National Rally did not associate their voices with those of the deputies of the New Popular Front. Faithful to his “tie strategy”always in search of respectability, Marine Le Pen's party wanted to be conciliatory. He displayed his “sense of responsibility” and led people to believe that the new government would be “under surveillance”, not to say under his influence.
A posture that the left has constantly assimilated to a form of complicity between the central bloc and the extreme right. By hammering home this idea, it made its way into the ranks of RN voters. An Elabe poll released on Wednesday estimates that 61% of RN supporters would today be in favor of voting for a motion of censure. The answer to the same question, asked at the beginning of October, received only 29% yes. It is also because she hears this music rising among her troops that Marine Le Pen fired her cuti this Wednesday, on RTL, threatening to vote for censorship if “the purchasing power of the French [était] still amputated » by the future budget. More than a piece of pressure on Michel Barnier, it is a promise that she makes to her voters. And that she will have to hold on to if she does not want to lose face, a « effort » of 60 billion to redress the nation's accounts being necessarily likely to have an impact, direct or indirect, on the purchasing power of the French.
Economic and financial chaos?
Added to this is another announcement, made by the New Popular Front this Thursday, in a column published by The World : if Michel Barnier decides to use a 49.3 to pass the budget, the left will table a new motion of censure. The probability that the National Assembly will adopt this budget being almost zero, it is difficult to see how the Prime Minister could do without it. What he admitted in an interview given to West France last week.
The whole thing forms a kind of spiral with an outcome that is not certain, but highly possible. The scenario: there would be 49.3 on the budget, followed by the tabling of a motion of censure, voted mechanically by the “coalition of opposites” which would see the two extremes of the hemicycle come together. The fall of the government would be accompanied by the rejection of the 2025 budget.
The Élysée and Matignon have convinced themselves that no one will risk triggering the economic and financial chaos that this cancellation will trigger. A very risky bet in these times when anger seems on the verge of stifling all reason and personal calculations taking precedence over any consideration for the general interest. On all floors.
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