The French prime minister, Michel Barnier, has resigned following a vote of no confidence in his government triggered by a tussle over his budget. His was a minority administration working with a fragmented and divided parliament, in which parties had little inclination to cooperate.
Read more: Why did the French government fall and what happens next?
French party leaders will have to develop a taste for coalitions and compromise if they are to have a stable government. This is the only option for a system ground to paralysis by a culture of majoritarianism.
Developing a more cooperative culture is possible. In fact, such cultures operate in plenty of other European countries.
First, if a minority administration is formed, the agreement between the government and its partners in parliament needs to be enshrined in a formal pact.
The French government fell because it behaved like it had a majority and because its ally, the Rassemblement National (RN), behaved like an opposition party. Both acted like competitors with their eye on future elections rather than on their current governing responsibilities.
This was visible in Barnier’s brinkmanship: he should have submitted his budget to the parliament for amendments and for a vote. Instead, he chose to use a constitutional mechanism that made a confidence vote the only alternative to allowing him to pass his budget. The opposition parties, unsurprisingly, triggered the confidence vote and took his government down.
Barnier knew this would be the result but was aiming to blame the RN for the chaos to harm its electoral prospects. The RN does now have to answer for its actions but we can expect to see Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron seeking to pass the blame back and forth between each other for the foreseeable future.
Such electioneering in the middle of a budgetary crisis could be avoided in the future if governing parties and their allies in parliament establish a governing pact. This is common practice for coalition governments in Belgium and Germany, where parties reach an accord that outlines their legislative programme. It is also frequently used in Spain, between minority administrations and their parliamentary supporters.
In France, such a mechanism is currently being touted in the form of a “no-censure” motion by the French Socialist party, but this proposal needs to be better developed.
Parties need to forge pacts that provide a common basis for them to work together and focus on the task of governing. This is eminently achievable, as other countries have shown. It just takes will on the part of French parties.
The second way forward is to give parliamentary committees more powers and to make them more representative of the parties in parliament.
The crisis around Barnier came about because both the government and RN maintained their majoritarian and competitive instincts when ratifying the government’s budget.
To pass the budget, the government followed the standard parliamentary procedure: the legal text was studied by finance committees in the lower and upper houses of parliament. Any differences between them was reconciled by a special committee, made up of seven members from each chamber, in proportion to the representation of parties. So it felt as though the final text reflected the mood of the parliament.
But RN still felt excluded from this process, and blamed the government for being closed to dialogue. This is to some extent true. Barnier said he would listen but would not negotiate endlessly.
Knowing that it could torpedo the budget, the RN nevertheless issued further demands it knew Barnier couldn’t deliver without derailing his plans to restructure public spending – and without losing face.
The negotiation between the government and its supposed parliamentary ally should instead have taken place while the budget text was being prepared.
This is what happens in Denmark and Sweden, where minority governments find legislative majorities to enact their laws because parliamentary parties exert influence over them through their representatives on powerful committees.
Stronger committees with a better representation of parties would help France avoid the kind of showdown we witnessed over Barnier’s budget.
The third way forward is to maintain the coalitions that parties forge to win elections once they enter government. In France, instead, what we saw this year were shifting electoral and governing coalitions.
An electoral pact was established, the so-called “republican front”, between the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), the centrists associated with president Emmanuel Macron and the centre-right Les Republicains. This grouping was designed to prevent the far-right RN from winning a legislative majority.
Their 2024 electoral pact involved standing down candidates in another party’s favour if it meant blocking an RN candidate from winning a seat. This tactic successfully prevented the RN from getting into power. But it also created three evenly sized political clusters and deprived the parliament of any outright legislative majority.
But then, the governing coalition changed. The economic ideologies of the NFP and the centrist group were too far apart for them to find a space for common action. The centrists turned right and asked the RN to abstain during the government’s vote of investiture, enabling them to govern as a minority.
These actions not only induced parliamentary stalemate, they also weakened democratic accountability: the centrist group had hoodwinked French voters into expecting a centre-left government before instead striking a deal with the far right.
These actions are fundamentally out of kilter with practices in other countries.
In Italy pre-electoral coalitions become the basis for government. Parties negotiate a platform for government ahead of time and present themselves to the electorate as a package. This was once a practice in France too, for example between the Communist and Socialist parties that united to support François Mitterand in the 1980s and 1990s.
For French parties to be honest and accountable to French voters, they will need to acquire a taste for maintaining such coalitions.
Simon Toubeau does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
