🇫🇷Bayrou's Career Pinacle
Prime Minister François Bayrou faces an uphill battle, and Moody’s downgrades France's credit rating
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This week
💼Prime Minister François Bayrou
📉Moody’s downgrades France credit rating
💼Prime Minister François Bayrou
Ladies and gentlemen, dear readers, this (probably) final (and surprisingly short) Weekly Dispatch of the year is bringing to you one pretty big piece of news that has made people cheer, smile sardonically, cry, and laugh:
After decades in the political sphere trying to push his way into high-office in France, having effectively held together the centre ground# by himself with nothing but attitude and Sellotape, he has finally pulled it off:
François Bayrou has been nominated by Emmanuel Macron to be a Prime Minister of the French Republic.
Naturally, because this is a politics, there are now several dozen rumours floating around about how this came about, ranging from hidden agreements between Macron and Bayrou, to Bayrou bullying his way into the position, with one rumour even claiming that a two-hour fight over the position resulted in Bayrou storming out and threatening to blow up the centrist coalition if he didn’t get what he wanted.
Regardless of what happened, we now need to move into the realm of what will happen next and why not that much has changed.
To begin with, Bayrou will now simply inherit the carnage that is the 17th legislature of the Assemblée Nationale, where the deputies remain split into three clear blocs:
The left, under the Nouveau Front Populaire, including the Socialists and the far-left La France Insoumise
The centre, “led” by Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, with links to Les Républicains, who haven’t been the most helpful to him
The far-right, led by Marine Le Pen and including Eric Ciotti’s Les Républicains offshoot.
This means that all of the problems that Michel Barnier encountered remain exactly the same, and Bayrou will have to deal with two-thirds of the building wanting to do nothing but cause Emmanuel Macron constant pain while setting up their own candidates for the upcoming elections.
Bayrou will be no different, of course, and will be working to place as many of his own MoDem deputies in important positions, which will likely see individuals like Jean-Noël Barrot being placed back in his position as Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs as he tries to see if he can use this opportunity to increase his influence and reputation.
Regardless of the politics of it all, Bayrou needs to set himself up quickly, leaving him at the mercy of other parties who know that they can extract concessions, such as LR Senate President, Gérard Larcher, demanding that the much criticised Bruno Retailleau be placed back at the Minister of the Interior.
Which, if done, would naturally mean that the Prime Minister immediately loses the left and that the government will have a hell of a problem on its hands. He can, of course, go another way and give concessions to the left, but he will then simply lose the right, and push Les Républicains closer to former boss, Eric Ciotti.
However, there’s one bright light for Bayrou.
While Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise basically started screaming immediately, the Parti Socialiste have chosen to be constructive and have demanded several guarantees in exchange for the PS censure:
Respect the expectations of the French on pensions, public services, security, justice, and access to healthcare
Renounce usage of article 49.3 and allow Parliament to regain all its rights
Learn from Michel Barniers failure, by ensuring that the RN is no longer the arbiter
Which unfortunately will run into the wall that is the LR refusing to work with the left.
But unfortunately for Monsieur Bayrou, aside from the need to get confirmed, he has even bigger problems dropping on him, such as:
📉Moody’s downgrades France credit rating
When it rains, it pours, and French politics is definitely no different.
With Michel Barnier’s government being brought down, the effective end of his contested reform package, and the budget situation highly unlikely to be resolved by the end of the year, the US agency Moody’s has hit France’s credit rating.
What a Christmas present for the incoming Prime Minister.
Dropping from Aa2 to Aa3 may seem like a small drop, but is a sign of a deeper malaise, with Moody’s having stated that it believes it to be “unlikely that the next government will reduce the size of budget deficits in the long term.”
“We expect France's public finances to be considerably weaker over the next three years compared to our base case in October [because of] political fragmentation more likely to prevent significant fiscal consolidation …It is now very unlikely that the next government will sustainably reduce the size of budget deficits beyond next year”
Without getting into the mathematics of it all, the simple reality is that a combination of the inability to produce a budget that was intended to reduce the deficit, the combination of policy proposals from the left and the right that would balloon both the budget and the deficit, and the brinkmanship being played by extremists like Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon who are exclusively trying to create crises that would propel them to the Elysée, means that France does not have stability.
Which will impact our economy, harm our citizens, and further propel and exacerbate the behaviours causing this instability.
And let’s be clear: this isn’t going to get better any time soon, with my expectation being that Bayrou will last until March/April before the government collapses yet again, and my assumption is that we should expect a legislative election shortly before or shortly after the summer.
And the reason for this is that there is no inherent stability from an election that has given us one of the most bitterly divided Assemblées that we have ever seen in the 5th French Republic.
The far-left and the far-right do not want the state to succeed on economic and social matters because it would render their parties moot and would reduce them back to their “Macron is bad” teeth gnashing.
Which is why this carousel of chaos will continue spinning, led by the two chaos-mongers in chief.
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