🇫🇷Political infighting
🇫🇷Political infighting
Pascal Canfin quits Renaissance BurEx, Michel Barnier works to build coalition in government, and Renaissance fights for its future
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This week
🙅Pascal Canfin quits Renaissance BurEx
👪Barnier works to build coalition
🥊Renaissance fights for its future
🙅Pascal Canfin quits Renaissance BurEx
To kick off the week, Emmanuel Macron’s party, Renaissance, saw one of its heavyweights quit the executive bureau this week over “profound disagreement” with its domestic politics
Decrying Emmanuel Macron’s political choices following the 2024 legislative elections, he decried the “profoundly toxic consequences” of Macron’s Strategy:
“While I continue to fully identify with the action we are taking at the European level with the entire l’Europe Ensemble delegation and the Renew [Europe] Group, I strongly disagree with the political strategy followed at the national level … I consider that, since July 7, choices have been made that do not correspond to the results of the legislative elections and the dynamic of the republican front that has allowed us to avoid the worst.
Today, Renaissance supports a government that is largely right-wing and whose survival depends on the goodwill of the National Rally …The days that have just passed since the appointment of the government demonstrate, if any were needed, the profoundly toxic consequences of this strategy”
Naturally, this echoes much of what I have been hearing from within the party, and from its allies, with a grave concern regarding what this signals for the direction of travel of the party and the country.
This isn’t helped by the fact that President Macron has previously refused to appoint a left-wing prime minister, notably Lucie Castets because the NFP did not have an absolute majority and wouldn’t be able to survive a no-confidence vote.
However, would the Barnier Government?
If things go badly, not so much.
Which is precisely why many complaints revolve around the argument given for the Barnier government, especially as Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National holds the government’s survival in her hands
As we discussed a few weeks back, Marine Le Pen is already working on a hypothesis of another dissolution in the short term, having begun looking for 577 candidates for the next elections and having already started planning for the next battles, which you can read below.
Onwards to a July 2025 election then? That’s my bet.
👪Barnier works to build coalition
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Moving on to team Barnier, the list of which you can find here, there is a herculean effort being made to construct this coalition and make sure that it can actually hold together.
Between the hard-right Bruno Retailleau (LR) in the position of Minister of the Interior, former PS minister of Justice Didier Migaud, and the various members of the Presidential former-majority caught between these two wings of the government, Barnier has a lot of work to do to keep people on track and working together.
As the minister for the ecological transition, Agnès Pannier-Runache (Renaissance) put it on France 5 this week: “We are political opponents ... our political families are not on the same side, but we are condemned to govern together.”
It’s precisely for this reason that Prime Minister Michel Barnier has taken his team off to a seminar for a few days to smooth over the cracks, bring people together, and to pull them back into line.
One major request that was made was for the ministers to avoid national media unless these had been explicitly agreed with Matignon. Barnier, fortunately for his own reputation, stopped short of asking people not to leak things.
🥊Renaissance fights for its future
Moving back to Renaissance, which is trying to figure out the next steps, we’re seeing an unholy alliance of two former competing ministers and potential party leaders.
Both former PM Gabriel Attal and former Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin have been working to reunify and reinforce the party structures in an attempt to recover from a damaging loss.
However, this unified action comes at a critical time for both actors: neither has any seniority over the rest of the party.
With no ministerial position or positional leverage over other actors, both former ministers have to work with what they have and try to manage the existential crisis that threatens to consume their party.
With Renaissance no longer being in the majority, no longer holding power over the Assemblée, and with Emmanuel Macron’s time as President slowly passing through his hands, everybody continues to worry about what comes next.
This existential crisis about the future of the centrist project, spearheaded by the charismatic Emmanuel Macron, is further exacerbated by those who are distancing themselves after the recent political decisions.
We saw this above with Pascal Canfin, but recently, deputy Sophie Errante quit the party to sit as a non-attached member of the Assemblée due with the same reasoning as Canfin.
But now, a big decision needs to take place, with Gabriel Attal running for the leadership of Renaissance and many in the party pleading for him to quit the position of Group president in the Assemblée to Darmanin in order to maintain balance to prevent a centralisation of power.
The problem being, both politicians, despite their current actions, are working towards the 2027 Presidential elections.
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I think were moving towards elections again next summer. The question is, will Renaissance survive as the party.of the centre, or will a new one take its place beforehand, without Macron who's become too aloof, even toxic? I wouldn't be surprised if Attal & Darmamin worked together on this to woo some of the more moderates on the left. I think there's certainly demand for a centre'left party, especially as the left as a whole haven't been able to get it together despite the NFP alliance's electoral success.