Michel Barnier ‘method’ at risk in raucous French parliament

Faced with France’s raucous hung parliament, Emmanuel Macron banked on one man to form a functioning government: Michel Barnier, whose “method” helped tame Brexit.

But three months on, the French president’s gamble on the former EU Brexit negotiator, famed for his ability to bring diplomacy to political discord, seems to have all but fallen flat.

At this stage, the one thing France’s leftist bloc and Marine Le Pen’s far-right team seem to agree on is ousting Barnier. Barring a last-minute surprise, he will be swept out of office on Wednesday in a no-confidence vote sparked by his attempt to plough ahead with an unpopular, belt-tightening budget.

If he falls it will mark a failure for the “Barnier method”, which the prime minister promised would be long on consensus-building and listening, and short on the ministerial theatrics of past Macron governments.

The 73-year-old also put forth his age and experience — including four stints as a minister and two terms as a European commissioner, the last five of which were spent grappling with Brexit — as proof that he could rise above the fray.

Unlike previous prime ministers under Macron, he even decreed that Le Pen and her Rassemblement National party were not to be treated as pariahs — an admission that his appointment and his survival as premier depended on her tacit support.

Yet it was Le Pen who on Monday brought down the boom on Barnier after days of talks in which he tried to address her “red lines” for the budget to pass.

The concessions he made were not enough. “It was mission impossible for Barnier,” said senator François Patriat, a longtime Macron ally who had been rooting for the government.

Recriminations are already flying about who is to blame. Barnier’s allies say he tried to keep the opposition onside and they bemoan an increasingly adversarial French political culture that prevents all co-operation. They argue that Le Pen kept moving the goalposts in the last-ditch talks, and that she never intended to compromise.

“Despite his diplomatic skills he was always walking a tightrope at risk of falling at any time,” said Véronique Louwagie, an MP from Barnier’s conservative Les Republicains party. “Barnier found himself in a face-off with an RN that was dishonest about its intentions and did not really want to negotiate.”

His opponents say his promises of openness were a masquerade and he side-stepped the lower house in favour of negotiating with friendlier, rightwing lawmakers in the Senate. “They only engaged with us on the budget when their backs were against the wall,” said a senior RN official.

The stratagems used by Barnier in Brexit talks simply were not applicable to the French political arena, said Thierry Chopin, a visiting professor at the College of Europe. During the five years of wrangling, Barnier was a consensual figure who worked hard to obtain and keep the backing of member states, which gave him legitimacy with British officials.

“The Brexit model worked well since Barnier’s job was to defend a shared position and reinforce unity, but in France none [of the parties] are held to any collective discipline,” he added. “There is no culture of compromise or negotiation as exists on the EU level.”

Barnier was not helped by the fact he hailed from a small party that had secured just 47 seats in the recent election, and had to preside over an awkward power-sharing arrangement with Macron’s centrist Ensemble pour la République (EPR) party. Yet instead of trying to unite that base, Barnier refused to call it a “coalition” — instead inventing the looser term “common core” with whom he did not negotiate a joint action plan.

Tensions soon cropped up between the two factions backing Barnier, epitomised by the public squabbling between their respective leaders, former prime minister Gabriel Attal of the EPR and the LR’s Laurent Wauquiez, who both hold presidential ambitions. Barnier did not intervene and said he did not want to act as the head of the so-called majority, people close to him said.

In the leadership vacuum, EPR and LR started loudly demanding changes to their own prime minister’s budget. Attal slammed the proposed reversal of some of the president’s long-held economic policies, such as not raising taxes, while Wauquiez lobbied against freezing pensions. “The prime minister did not get all the support he needed from his own camp,” said Louwagie.

In the end, Barnier drafted the budget knowing that he would probably have to resort to the 49.3 clause of the constitution to pass it since he did not have a majority in parliament.

Seen by critics as an undemocratic tool that bypasses parliament, Barnier chose not to use it early on, unlike Macron’s earlier prime ministers, so as to let the debate flow. But with the 49.3 all but inevitable, MPs knew the debates and amendments were little more than political theatre since the government would decide what stayed in the budget.

The true test of Barnier’s negotiating skills came in the home stretch ahead of a Monday vote on the first section of the budget, which covers social security spending. RN listed a number of irritants that it wanted changed, such as a tax increase on electricity and lower reimbursements for medicines. When Barnier eventually yielded on electricity, he refused to give the RN credit, which put Le Pen’s back up.

She gave him an ultimatum to address her other demands before the Monday vote.

Only hours before the vote, Le Pen and Barnier spoke to each other multiple times on the phone, said people familiar with the matter. He made one more concession by mid-day on the medicines, giving her public credit in the announcement, but then drew the line at giving her the most costly one, namely scrapping a temporary freeze on pension increases.

Le Pen was unmoved. “We will vote in favour of the censure motion. The French people have nothing to fear,” she said.

Patriat, the veteran senator who supports the government, admitted that he misread Le Pen’s intentions, and suggested Barnier had similarly miscalculated. “Even when the prime minister capitulated to many of her requests, it had little effect,” he lamented. “I never thought she would go this far.”