The Gravedigger

When Michel Barnier’s appointment as Prime Minister was announced on 5 September, many French voters experienced two simultaneous sensations which say a lot about the country’s political direction. The first was, naturally, surprise – that a man who is no longer seen as a frontline politician, whose name was not even mentioned during the election campaign, should be given this post. The second was déjà vu. Over the course of the last half century, Barnier has held nearly every position in the cursus honorum of French politics: local elected official, MP, senator, minister, European commissioner. He is an exemplary figure of the vieux monde that Emmanuel Marcon purported to oppose when he ran for President as a ‘modernizer’ and ‘disrupter’ back in 2017.

Who would have guessed that at the end of his career – at age 73 ­– Barnier would be moving into Matignon? Following his appointment, an archival clip from 1971 circulated on social networks, showing a young Barnier delivering a speech so vapid and anodyne that he already sounded like a seasoned politician. One gets the impression that he has never changed, that he was born, Athena-like, fully armed with political cant. A typical careerist of the conservative bourgeois political class, he has known no other profession: elected to public office in his home region of the Savoie at the age of 22, he was a member of parliament by the age of 27. The viral clip betrays his essence: an ambitious yet second-rate statesman, who has spent his life navigating the troubled waters of the French right without ever rising to the top – until now.

‘Michel Barnier, homme de consensus’, declared Le Monde on 5 September. Opportunist would be more accurate. Balladurian under Balladur, Juppéist under Juppé, Chiraquian under Chirac, Sarkozist under Sarkozy, Barnier succeeded in obtaining ministerial positions in most right-wing governments between 1993 and 2009 – a tour de force of politicking. His reputation as a competent technocrat eventually opened the doors of the European Commission. Defeated by Jean-Claude Juncker in his bid for the Presidency of the Commission in 2014, he rebounded when Juncker enlisted him as chief Brexit negotiator: a role in which, heedless of economic rationality or popular sovereignty, he sought to inflict maximal punishment on Britain for opting to leave the bloc.

Upon returning to France, now full of hubris, Barnier entered the Les Républicains primary contest, in hopes of standing as the centre-right party’s candidate in the 2022 presidential elections. In his efforts to seduce conservative voters, Barnier did not hesitate to deploy the arguments of the Brexiteers on immigration and the European Court of Justice, vowing to ‘put a stop to immigration’ and create ‘constitutional shield’ against laws that are ‘too favourable to foreigners’. The campaign was a flop. Yet it helped to reveal Barnier’s true colours. His reflexes on social issues have always been reactionary, and his long record of voting against abortion and gay rights put him at a distance from the early incarnation of Macronism; but as the latter shifted to the right – railing against ‘le wokisme’ – they were brought into perfect alignment.

Proud, opportunistic, conservative, but lacking any strong political vision, Barnier is perfect for the role that Macron now intends him to play: to transmute the electoral alliance known as the ‘republican front’, which prevented the Rassemblement National (RN) from obtaining a majority in the National Assembly, into a parliamentary alliance of the centre. This strategy has one goal: to maintain an economic policy favourable to capital. To understand Barnier’s appointment, along with the game that Macron has been playing since the legislative elections, one must recall the changing nature of Macronism, which has become increasingly authoritarian and repressive during its second term. This shift has not merely been a matter of political tactics, but a response to the present state of French capitalism.

Since 2017, the French economy has weakened, productivity has declined and growth has been minimal. To ensure profitability, some fractions of capital have become increasingly dependent on state support, with an estimated 130 to 200 billion euros distributed to private companies each year. The worsening public deficit reflects this: the state guarantees a rate of return higher than the rate of growth, and assumes responsibility for the shortfall. Yet one significant fraction of capital – finance – demands iron-clad guarantees on public debt. Macronism is thus forced to act as capital’s justice of the peace, trying to reconcile these conflicting interests.

It has done so by shifting the burden of adjustment onto labour – hence the fall in real wages, reduction in unemployment benefits and cuts to public services since 2021. The aim of Macron’s presidency is to maintain this asymmetry between workers and bosses. It is in this context that we must understand its growing authoritarianism, which reached new levels with last year’s pension reform. Rammed through parliament in the face of widespread popular opposition, and enforced at street level with the help of unchecked police brutality, the policy was denounced by both the left and the far right.

The RN, however, is now seeking to project an image of ‘respectability’ to the financial markets and traditional conservative electorate. During the June election campaign, it submitted its programme to an ‘audit of public finances’, effectively announcing that most of its ‘social’ measures would be annulled if it came to power. The left, meanwhile, agreed on a relatively moderate programme, yet – in a clear rupture with Macronism – aimed to reverse the President’s reforms and make capital pay. Macron’s difficulty is therefore this: in order to stay afloat politically, his camp must forge a new electoral alliance; but to maintain its pro-capital agenda, it cannot countenance any such agreement with the left. Thus, following the second round, the President sought to exclude the New Popular Front despite its winning the most seats, citing the ‘danger’ it would pose to the French economy. With the explicit support of Medef, the French employers’ union, he thus further restricted the scope of French democracy: effectively ruling any alternative economic policy out of bounds.

From the perspective of capital, this move makes perfect sense. But it presupposes the betrayal of the republican front and the establishment of an ‘entente cordiale’ with the RN. For the latter, this exclusion of the left is a blessing, making it the only ‘credible’ alternative to Macronism while granting it extraordinary power over the new government. In recent weeks, Macron submitted the names of prime ministerial candidates to Marine Le Pen, who was free to make her selection. Barnier owes his nomination to her goodwill, which he presumably earned with his virulently anti-migrant remarks during the 2021 primaries. His appointment represents an attempt to guarantee Macron’s anti-labour agenda under the watchful eye of the RN, on which the future of his premiership depends. He has become linchpin of a de facto alliance between Macronism and the far right.

The Barnier government is yet to be formed, but two of its political characteristics have already been made clear: a commitment to austerity and an obsession with immigration. In his first television interview, Barnier promised ‘not to increase the debt’ and to ‘control migratory flows’. Amid talk of reestablishing an ‘immigration ministry’, the new Prime Minister visited a Parisian hospital to affirm that major cutbacks will be necessary. The ‘retournement des alliances’ which he embodies can only accelerate the decline of French democracy. The republican front strategy has proved to be a trap, and the election has resulted in an outcome contrary to the logic of the vote. The public rejected Macronism in the first round and the RN in the second. Now they are getting both.

The French situation confirms that the far right can only come to power with the support of forces dedicated to defending the interests of capital. It also exposes the limitations of the left. By insisting that change must be pursued solely through the electoral realm, and by limiting that change to the regulation or amelioration of capitalism, it finds itself pushed to the margins of a democracy ever more tightly delimited by a capitalism in crisis. If the left is to renew itself, it must recognize that the crisis of the regime is only one facet of a broader one. But it may already be too late. The gravediggers of democracy, led by Michel Barnier, are hard at work.