The French government fell today (12/4/24). Does anyone care?

Y’all need to talk 'Murrican. We caint tell the difference betwen a Prime Minister and a President over here. Heck, iffn our govern-ment collapsed as of’en as them there Euros, we’d be headin down to the Walmart and grabbin us some big screen TVs! Woohoo!!

When noxious party leaders become an attractive feature of your electoral politics, not a bug fatal to that party’s electoral success, your country is in for a rough ride.

We had a thread as the elections that lead up to this occurred which included a very good analysis of why Macron chose as he did by @FrenchDunadan, and this penultimate post:

The answer of about two and a half months is not a shock.

The Right holds the strong hand now to my understanding. They were stopped in round two only by cooperation of the center and left that Macron subsequently poisoned.

I readily admit that French politics and how their system works is foreign to me. I know just enough to be very concerned about instability in general but in particular that this representing a further notch across Europe to the Far Right gaining more power.

FWIW my understanding is that his party did not win the most votes; they won the most seats. The center and the left cooperated, dropping candidates out strategically in the second round, forcing upon the right the equivalent of an electoral college loss. The right won the most votes.

Ah, yes, good correction - thanks.

The Left (New Popular Front) is a coalition of: communists, ecologists, socialists and followers of Melenchon (LFI). All together they can align the most seats in the Assembly, but not a majority.
The far right (National Assemble) is the bigger party but has less seats than that coalition.
Macron’s party and allies come third in number but won’t ally with any of the two , for fear the Left will destroy everything Macron ever did and the Far Right is unacceptable.
The traditionnal Right was the lest numerous but ended being called to power with Barnier. That didn’t have a majority either…
He could count on the presidential party, but needed to appraise either the Left or the Far Right or face a “motion de censure”. He managed to do that during two months, giving numerous concessions left and right, but ultimately that wasn’t enough.
Problem is, anybody will now face the same predicament.

So which French pretender will take the throne now?

I tangentially follow French politics, this isn’t too surprising, the question was just “when.” Barnier was a sacrificial lamb.

France isn’t a parliamentary country in the same sense that Canada is, or a secular parliament like Germany even. The PM is in more ways than one subservient to the President. Terminology is not wrong though, they can be “without a government” for the reasons stated just fine, even if the executive branch is whole.

Though this being France specifically, I’d expect guillotines nonetheless.

Correct, and also it’s a coalition of which Mélenchon’s party is the largest in it, there are 3 dozen or so parties in that coalition, most of which are tiny and didn’t get electoral victories. And there’s lots of squabbling.

True, but the French Constitution uses “Gouvernement” / “Government” to refer to the PM and Cabinet, in both the official French version, and the English translation provided by the Conseil constitutionnel. See Title III: The Government / Titre III: Le Gouvernement.

The French version uses the terms “responsabilité” and “censure”, which the English version translates as confidence and non-confidence motions. See arts 34-1 and 49.

Query: “secular parliament”? not familiar with that term.

https://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/le-bloc-de-constitutionnalite/texte-integral-de-la-constitution-du-4-octobre-1958-en-vigueur

It was all over NPR this morning. Also the Washington Post.

[looks at the time of the OP] Maybe you just picked it up before they’d had a chance to check the story and write up their versions?

Macron retains the throne. Which further sacrificial lamb gets to be his Prime Minister… Names I’ve seen mentioned are Bernard Cazeneuve (moderate Socialist and former PM) and François Bayrou (centrist).

It should also be pointed out that the French political landscape has been dramatically altered in the past 7 years.

It used to be that there were only two parties that could have a realistic shot at power : the Parti Socialiste and the rightists (under various names, but with more or less the same core of people, Chirac, Juppé and later Sarkozy), with the far-right as trouble-makers. The extreme-left was pretty much a joke.

Macron’s rise to power was a surprise since he was neither part of the PS, nor the right. It ended decades of predictability. Now, the right is only the fourth party in terms of representation and the PS only avoided total obliteration by joining the New Popular Front leftist alliance, where Melenchon, with his endless controversial, extreme declarations, is the one calling the shots.

Someone waking up from an 8-year coma wouldn’t be able to make sense of what has happened to French politics recently. The two parties that dominated the landscape for decades have practically disappeared and extremism from both the left and right has pervaded every single aspect of the political discourse.

Well, it makes for a great band name.

More seriously, I imagine it means a parliament in which God plays no part. No “under God” in the Constitution, for example. But I’m just guessing; I don’t know for sure.

This article includes a pretty good overview (from an outside perspective) of the situation, the competing powers, and why things are so messy right now.

In a broad factional sense, you’ve got the left, the right, and Macron’s technocrats. This last lays claim to the center, but the others accuse him of not having a clearly defined or articulated ideology, so that centrism is arguable.

None of the three trusts the other two, but each one is willing to ally with (and use) each of the other two at various times to achieve different goals. Macron’s faction and the left agree that the right is populated by lunatics and cannot be allowed to take power, so they strategize during the election to ensure that doesn’t happen. Yet the left opposes Macron’s financial reforms, and they’re willing to strategize with the right to frustrate those initiatives. Macron’s faction and the right perceive the left as being politically immature, emotional and reactionary, and they can’t be trusted with power either, so the insistence on a left-aligned replacement PM becomes a non-starter. And so on, and so on, with alliances shifting constantly as the various parties jockey to frustrate moves by the others, and a public that is exhausted but also vaguely entertained, at least in the short term, by the squabbling.

Here in my Luxembourg office, my French co-worker says: “We love talking about politics, but only in the sense that we prefer to elect leaders who are easy to complain about.”

So I wouldn’t expect this logjam to clear up any time soon, at least until the French public gets tired of the maneuvering and decides which direction they want to lean.

So there’s a fox, a chicken, and a bag of corn. You can only take one item at a time in the boat.

Take the chicken, come back for the corn. Fuck the fox, why do you need a fox anyway?

That’s what I understand by the word “secular”, but I wonder if, judging by the context of the original reference, what was intended was something more like “sovereign”.

To bite you while you’re rowing. What else? :wink:

There will always be a fox. There’s no choice. The US has Fox News and it’s not going away.