By Luis Miguel Pascual
Paris, Dec 4 (EFE).- Three months after being appointed head of the French government, Michel Barnier fell on Wednesday following a vote of no confidence backed by the left and far-right parties, leaving President Emmanuel Macron to find a way out of the political deadlock in the face of a hung parliament.
The no-confidence vote received 331 votes in favor, well above the 288 needed to pass.
Macron will address the nation in a speech on Thursday in which he is expected to outline his plans.
Barnier, a former EU Brexit negotiator, was selected in September by the president for his success in negotiating a deal with the UK, but failed to pass a budget for 2025, making him the shortest-serving prime minister since the end of World War II.
Ahead of the vote, Barnier, 73, warned of the risks of political instability for the country, but his appeal was not enough to change the course of the no-confidence vote.
The outcome had been evident since Monday, when far-right leader Marine Le Pen broke off negotiations and announced that her party would back a possible no-confidence vote.
As expected, the left, which has a majority with 193 seats, tabled the motion supported by the far-right, which has almost 140 deputies.
Éric Coquerel, a deputy from the left-wing La France Insoumise party, who defended the motion, denounced Barnier’s illegitimacy to hold the post, coming as he does from a group with just 47 deputies, and said his fall should open the door to the president’s resignation.
“(The French president was) today an obstacle, and in no way a solution. Today we are voting to censure your government, but more than anything else, we are sounding the death knell for a mandate: that of the president,” he added.
Le Pen, who presented another parallel motion that was not even voted since the first one triumphed, has been ramping up the pressure on Macron to resign, and accused Barnier of being a “continuator” of the president.
“It’s up to his conscience to decide whether he can sacrifice public action and the fate of France to his own pride,” she said during the debate referring to the president.
Barnier was also criticized by socialists, communists, and ecologists, and defended by the traditional right, centrists, and the Macronist Gabriel Attal, his predecessor in office.
The ball is in Macron’s court
The Prime Minister will have to submit his resignation to Macron, who arrived at the Elysée a few minutes before the result of the no-confidence vote after a three-day state visit to Saudi Arabia.
The president is again facing a complex situation, as he did in July, when the parliamentary elections resulted in a hung parliament, divided into three irreconcilable blocs, making it difficult to govern the country, and without the possibility of holding new elections in a year by constitutional mandate.
Macron then postponed the decision until the end of the Olympic Games, leaving Attal in office for two months, and discovered the difficulty of finding a consensus prime minister. He thought he had it in Barnier, but recent events have proved him wrong.
In the next few days, he will have to find a figure capable of leading the country out of the deadlock and adopting new budgets for 2025 at a time when the economy is faltering.
The constitution sets no deadline for the appointment of a new government.
The president has a busy schedule this weekend, receiving several heads of state for the reopening of Notre Dame.
The country is entering a period of uncertainty in the face of a situation it has never experienced before.
Only once before had a motion of censure won, in 1962 against Georges Pompidou, but then the National Assembly was dissolved, and General de Gaulle won a landslide victory and reappointed his allies.
Now Macron’s hands are tied and he does not seem to have any clear tools to overcome the political crisis. EFE
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