A minority executive in the National Assembly that depends on the right and the elected Macronists to govern… At the parliamentary level, Michel Barnier’s government, appointed on Saturday 21 September, is part of the continuity of the previous legislature, sold out by the dissolution of 9 June.
The political balances maintained by the former Brexit negotiator to form his government allow him to claim the support, or at least the indulgence, of “220 to 230 deputies”, whether it is the “the most important base of the National Assembly”, he argued on Sunday evening on the 8pm news on France 2. To outdo the New Popular Front (NFP) and its 193 elected officials or the 142 deputies of the National Rally (RN) and its allies.
On paper, the Prime Minister can count on the 96 deputies of the Together for the Republic (EPR) led by Gabriel Attal, his 47 colleagues called The Republican Right of Laurent Wauquiez, the 36 elected by François Bayrou’s moderator, the 33 deputies of Horizontes d’Edouard Philippe and the 22 members of the heterogeneous centrist group Liberties, Independents, Overseas and Territories (LIOT). These are, more or less, the contours of the very relative majority that had re-elected, in June, the president of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet (213 votes).
A parliamentary base that remains shaky for Michel Barnier, who first pays for his weak legitimacy, being from the Les Républicains (LR) party, a formation that only obtained 5% of the votes in the last legislative elections, rejecting the republican front against the extreme right. “I know well that my mandate is fragile,” admitted on Sunday evening, without revealing the content of his roadmap, scheduled for 1Ahem October during his general policy statement at the Bourbon Palace.
A blocked parliamentary equation
During the previous legislature, the accumulation of votes by Macronist MPs (250) and elected officials from the LR (62) to reject motions of censure or to have certain texts approved allowed the stability of the Borne and Attal governments. After the dissolution, the strong antagonism between the three blocks of the hemicycle (left, centre, far right) and the prospect of future elections prevented the emergence of any majority combination. The impossibility of dissolving the National Assembly for a year weighs on the capacity for action of the Barnier government, which no longer has this weapon of deterrence to consolidate its authority.
In this tight parliamentary equation, the head of government, assisted by the influential president (LR) of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, has succeeded in anchoring the right to the Macronist camp after seven years of vacillation. With its 47 deputies, LR has 131 senators. A significant point in the ability of the right to influence the drafting of texts in the parliamentary back-and-forth between the National Assembly and the Senate, as illustrated by the pension reform or the “immigration” law.
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