“Hello Papa Tango Charlie / Please respond, we’re looking for you.” In the insistent refrain of the song - written in French - by American singer Mort Shuman, an air traffic controller tries to make contact with a pilot flying “towards the Bermuda Triangle”. This sense of helplessness in the face of an anticipated crash, unfolding in slow motion in a hazy atmosphere, has probably resonated with many of us since the appointment of Michel Barnier and the members of his new government.

It is not just this latest rightwards shift of ’Macronism’ that causes unease, but the institutional circumstances under which it is happening. The situation can be summed up by two observations: never before has a government been formed this way in France’s Fifth Republic, and nor would it ever be created this way in the “classic” parliamentary model our country might be edging towards.

A protest against the appointment of Michel Barnier as prime minister, September 7^th 2024, in Rennes, north-western France. © Jerome Gilles / NurPhoto / NurPhoto via AFP

Since the creation of the Fifth Republic system in 1958, under which the French head of state is elected by universal suffrage, two scenarios have prevailed. The first is where a prime minister is appointed who is both subordinate to the occupant of the Élysée and assured of an absolute majority in the Assembly to govern. “One president, one party, one parliamentary group,” as described by constitutional expert and professor emeritus Pierre Avril, is the “trilogy” that has characterised the regime at its peak. At its core is the unwritten convention that the prime minister is not so much accountable to parliamentarians as to the president himself.

The second, rarer, scenario has been what is called ’cohabitation’. In such cases, prime ministers regain their independence from the Élysée but continue to benefit from control of the Assembly by their political camp, without the risk of being censured or having crucial legislative proposals thrown out. Each time cohabitation has happened, the governing Right and Left have navigated these temporary periods, fully intending to regain unshared power. And in the early 2000s, the political parties backed a move to have a five-year presidential term – presidents had previously served for seven years - to minimise the likelihood of such cohabitations.

Since the parliamentary elections of 2022, however, and even more since those in 2024, the mechanism has stalled, as no established political camp has managed to secure an absolute majority in the National Assembly. A change of approach was therefore necessary. As Mediapart has pointed out, in other European countries such a situation is helped by established rules or customs, which our 66-year-old system lacks.

A prime minister without a majority

Nothing, however, prevented the political actors from rising to meet the challenge of this unprecedented situation. Emmanuel Macron could have cast himself in the role of an arbitrator, rather than engaging in consultations in which he was a partisan player. By default, he should have given the leftwing alliance the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) a chance, based on the number of seats it won and the fact that it had stood down candidates in certain constituencies in the second round of the election to ensure the far-right did not take power.

Political parties themselves, at least those officially opposed to the xenophobic and pro-Putin line of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), could have carried out negotiations without waiting to be summoned to the Élysée. They could have sought agreement on a few priorities in the public interest to pursue for at least a year. But this evidently proved beyond their capabilities.

In other democratic systems, even minority governments negotiate with non-government forces to ensure their political survival. And government coalitions, regardless of their parliamentary strength, are typically the result of manifesto agreements that are fiercely debated, and sometimes even ratified by party members. In the case of Michel Barnier, however, a government that is both eclectic and heavily right-leaning was formed in a vacuum, with no guarantee of its fate as it enters the parliamentary arena.

To put it more bluntly: this method is a mess. “While [Michel Barnier] is no longer the president’s man,” legal expert Bruno Daugeron said in early September, “the prime minister is also no longer, as has been said, the man of the ‘majority.’” Indeed, he did not obtain a majority at the ballot box, and he has also made no effort to build one by broadening the political base on which he stands - something that would have required abandoning the pursuit of certain policies.

Some might argue that if the Rassemblement National does decide to keep this government alive, the situation would accurately reflect the minority status of the Left in both the electorate and the Assembly. However, this overlooks the fact that within our two-round electoral system, a majority of voters in the second round rallied behind a “republican front” against the far-right. Should the government yield to the RN’s blackmail, or even if it simply holds back from political battles with the RN, the arithmetic of the seats won’t conceal the moral betrayal.

Emmanuel Macron and Michel Barnier are in fact attempting to address a crisis of representivity, which has been undermining the Fifth Republic for at least three decades, with a political solution that disregards … representivity. Since the creation of the regime in 1958, it is hard to think of a government that has resided on such a narrow popular and parliamentary base. The comparison becomes even starker when one looks at other European countries, where executives and their supporters tend to represent half the electorate or more.

The most worrying aspect is that the emotions stirred by this situation - incomprehension, disgust, a sense of betrayal and powerlessness - will be hard to channel in a democratic political direction, one guided by alternatives that prioritise collective intelligence and pluralism.

Seven decades of a leadership plebiscite model – where voters get to approve a new leader every few years - have weakened the intermediary bodies that might have helped develop more political engagement. Long fuelled by resentment, the RN, on the other hand, can claim to restore strong governance, putting an end to sacrifices and ensuring a system in which social solidarity is reserved for those from the “native culture” and for the “deserving”.

Macron and Barnier, not content with dragging French democracy into a no man’s land of legitimacy, are doing so with a short-term logic, blind to the destabilising forces they could unleash. In Mort Shuman’s song, the out-of-control pilot ends his final communication with these words: “My plane’s going crazy / I don’t care about anything / I’m going to drown my loneliness / In the Bermuda Triangle!”

Fabien Escalona