The question of government formation has been the subject of numerous studies in political science. They allow us to establish four results that can be verified in the unprecedented case of the formation of the Barnier government.
First result: institutional limitations weigh on the formation of governments. There is a difference between presidential, semi-presidential and parliamentary systems. The former grant a privileged place to ministers who are not associated with the parties and to people close to the president, while the governments of the latter are populated by personalities linked to a party. As for the category of semi-presidential regimes – of which the V is a part –my Republic: It is somewhere between the two. It was also established that non-partisan appointments and those of people close to the president increased with the latter’s institutional weight.
In the light of this grid, Barnier’s government bears witness to a move towards parliamentarisation: it is massively composed of actors linked to a party. Only the first and the last by protocol escape this logic: Didier Migaud, former president of the High Authority for the Transparency of Public Life, as Keeper of the Seals, and Clara Chappaz, former director of the French Technological Mission, as Secretary of State, responsible for artificial intelligence and digital technology. But if the presidential weight in the formation of government has diminished, it has not disappeared. The new government only includes a small group committed to it since 2017. However, this group occupies, by a large majority, full-fledged positions in strategic sectors (economy, budget, industry, labor and employment, education, public services).
Second result: the negotiations to form a coalition government are led by what is called a party in formation, which must initiate discussions with the other parties. It is the party that has the largest number of seats in parliament and which usually receives the largest number of government posts. The Republicans (LR), Michel Barnier’s party, can be considered as this formative party, but with certain reservations.
Low ideological distance
The first caveat is that it only occupies fifth place in the National Assembly and represents only 8% of parliamentarians. However, in a minority position, LR has been the one that has pulled the most out of the fire: it represents a quarter of the government’s members and if we add the former LR members who joined Macronism or who went over to Horizons: the figure rises to about half. As a good educational party, LR and its dissidents have obtained a good harvest of government posts.
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