The Irish Times view on politics in France: a dangerous period of drift

Seven weeks after the July 7th election produced a bitterly divided parliament, France still does not have a new government and shows little sign of getting one. Unlike neighbour Belgium with its long experience of struggling through with “temporary” caretaker governments, France, with little tradition of coalition-building, appears to be drifting.
With the August holidays and the distraction of the Olympics over, president Emmanuel Macron, whose own coalition took a drubbing in the election, is still showing little sense of urgency in filling the post of prime minister. He has now enraged the winning left bloc, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), by rejecting its nomination of 37-year-old civil servant Lucie Castets, arguing that she would immediately be opposed by “over 350 deputies” in the 577-seat National Assembly.
Determined above all to defend his political legacy, Macron has been encouraging parts of the NFP, the Socialists, Greens and Communists, to “propose ways to co-operate with other political forces”, or in other words to break the alliance which also contains the hard-left La France Insoumise (LFI). The NFP response has been to call supporters out on the streets against what they see as a denial of democracy.
The nomination of Castets, a little known former socialist, was already a concession by the NFP to the unwillingness of the president to contemplate LFI leadership of the government. However, the alliance remains committed to its popular programme of rolling back Macron’s austerity politics – bringing back the age of retirement to 62, pouring more money into health and education, and upping tax on the ultra rich. All of which is just as unpalatable to the centre right.
Macron’s dissolution of parliament in a misguided attempt to bring political “clarity” to the country’s politics in the face of the rise of the far-right has backfired. His refusal to coalition-build or recognise the voters’ yearning for “change” is a recipe for drift and chaos which is likely to only benefit the far-right forces which he has been trying to head off.