Please see @zaphod@sopuli.xyz 's answer for another point of view on the situation.
The general feeling is hard to grasp. Summer is always a kind of political truce, plus we hosted the olympic games. I guess it will be very different in a few days/weeks when everyone comes back from vacation.
Thank you for both vocabulary and the in-depth explanation of Macron’s central position with which I agree. To add to your explanation, the presidence of our parliament remained in macron’s hands which makes my previous point quite dishonest, or at least overstates the importance of the far right group.
This is very simplified and of course, biased as I am a regular citizen with some political ideology but I’ll try and be as neutral as I can.
Well, we just voted for a new parliament. Ever since 1957 (when the 5th republic pretty much started), there have been mostly obvious winners for these elections, implying that culturally our political parties have not been the best at negotiating.
The president is responsible for naming a prime minister from the majority but the definition of a majority can be odd because of how impeachment works. There have been quite a few situations in which the president and his prime minister were from different parties, rendering the president’s powers basically symbolic for day-to-day stuff, the prime minister was then handling pretty much everything.
But during these times, the prime ministers had large majorities and there was little to no chance of the prime minister being fired by parliament.
The censorship motion (which I might call « firing » or « impeaching » because I have no clue how to properly translate this) basically works as such: someone calls for it, and it requires 289/577 representatives to vote yay. There may be negotiations in order for non-allied yet not-too-hostile groups to not vote, which is what is happening right now.
But now, even though the left won, they have too few allies to prevent being censored by parliament. There are basically three groups with approximately equal numbers of representatives: left, center-right and far right. So if a left prime minister were to be appointed, the two other groups would impeach them, and so on for other groups.
But here comes the special role of « king maker » of the far right: they laid their conditions for not impeaching a right-leaning government, and the left does not have enough representatives to impeach this newly appointed person.
And since it’s still the president’s responsibility to appoint a prime minister, Macron negotiated with the far right to try and appoint Barnier.
So what’s left to figure is: what the far right requires, how long this government will stand and whether Macron will call for new elections next year. There may be no elections for the next 10 months, even if Macron resigns, so we’re stuck with this odd situation which has never happened with the current constitution of France.
It’s a bit hard summarizing everything but I hope I got the point across.
Not a lawyer but an informed citizen, I’d be happy to be corrected if I’m wrong.
That’s a spirit of the law vs letter of the law question which to my understanding has not been answered. I am no lawyer but the wording of our constitution is pretty ambiguous and leaves room to interpretation. I won’t try and translate the article in question because as I said, not a lawyer and some blurred lines may be lost in my attempt at writing legalese in a foreign language.
It’s also useful to point out that this situation has never happened before. Yes the left coalition has the highest number of representatives, but there is little political room (as seen when the most radical parts of the coalition proposed not to participate directly in a would-be government) for expanding said coalition.
The constitution of the fifth republic was written in much different times, when De Gaulle wanted to avoid the fourth republic’s issues which was very parliamentary, but quite unstable. He wanted to be able to pick, and got this power when the constitution was written.
But we’ve reached this odd situation (no obvious majority because of the three-block-parliment) which was not really anticipated. So we’ll see how it goes, how long Barnier’s government will stand. As of now, the far right has given it’s blessing not to censor the government, making it a center-right-far right de facto coalition. But as of today, these are just words, so we’re not sure what the exact terms of their agreement are. From what I know, the far right is not trying to participate in the current government, they would just abstain from participating in votes of no confidence, which would prevent such votes from having any effect, due to the current structure of parliament.
A party is also trying to impeach Macron which I think has never happened before in the 5th republic.