In military parlance, “to mark time” is to move one’s feet in a steady cadence without actually going anywhere. Emmanuel Macron, who entered politics with the command “En Marche!”, is now marking time. The appointment of Sébastien Lecornu as prime minister makes it clear that the president does not yet know where he wants to go or whether there is any way to get there from here.
The problem remains what it has been since last June’s precipitous and calamitous dissolution. There is no viable majority in the National Assembly as currently constituted. Macron tried twice to create a majority by combining the mushy center with the increasingly recalcitrant and reactionary Republicans, but both attempts ended in failure, as first Barnier and then Bayrou had to face the fact that this center-right coalition of mush and grit simply didn’t have the votes to get budgets done, budgets being the place where rhetoric is turned into reality.
Now Macron is trying again with Lecornu. He is being blasted for appointing a clone of himself. Indeed, Lecornu is as close to Macron as it is possible to get. He was one of the first LR deputies to jump ship to join the maverick president in 2017 (and was expelled from LR because of it). He has prospered ever since in a variety of ministerial and sub-ministerial roles, most recently as minister of defense (or should I say of “armed forces,” now that Trump has legitimized a more martial vocabulary?). More than that, he has become an intimate of the president, one of the small circle of aides who from time to time shares an evening drink or supper with the head of state.
More important, Lecornu has carefully cultivated a profile so low that nobody has any idea what he stands for. He has boldly announced that what France needs now is “ruptures on substance and not just form” without so much as a hint of what those ruptures might be. He then said he would begin “consultations” with the parties, as indeed Macron’s appointment message enjoined him to do. In effect, he has been nominated to be the “negotiator” that Gabriel Attal called for rather than the actual prime minister. In short, his mission is to find out what price the barons who control the innumerable parliamentary factions will exact in exchange for allowing a government to be formed at all and perhaps even to survive for another six months or a year or, with a luck almost impossible to imagine, until the end of Macron’s term in the spring of 2027.
Lecornu has the requisite “flexibility.” He was once François Fillon’s campaign manager, establishing his bona fides with the provincial Catholic right. He opposed Hollande’s “marriage for all” initiative but, with judicious ecumenicism, was careful to say that “gay communautarisme exasperates me almost as much as homophobia.” As he moved up in the ranks of the center-right, he moved toward the center, attaching himself to Bruno Le Maire and eventually to Macron. But he was also the kind of centrist who could be trusted to engage in discreet and initially unreported meetings with Le Pen and Bardella.
Now he will serve at Le Pen’s sufferance. With J.-L. Mélenchon unalterably opposed to the new government, it will survive only if Lecornu can persuade the RN to abstain in a vote of confidence. Le Pen may agree to this, because she is still ineligible (pending appeal of her malfeasance conviction) and may prefer to watch Macron twist in the wind for awhile. She may even be looking for help in beating the rap one way or another.
Lecornu will also try to woo the PS, which is caught between a rock and a hard place. A dissolution now could well prove catastrophic for the PS, whereas it might be able to extract a few goodies from the eager new PM, such as a wealth tax of some sort (perhaps even the whole Zucman tax), some concessions on pension modifications for jobs classified as “arduous,” preservation of medical assistance for immigrants, backpedaling on the Loi Duplomb, etc. But the PS will have to obtain something of real value to make it worthwhile to compromise itself yet again with a president who has repeatedly dangled promises only to snatch them away.
Still, the most difficult negotiations to come could well be in the PM’s own camp–if you’ll permit me the exaggeration of describing the center as a “camp” when it is really a hodge-podge of guerilla bands led by a host of aspiring generalissimos. There are so many presidential hopefuls in the Attal-to-Retailleau marais that it would strain my memory to name them all. Lecornu will need all his vaunted negotiating skills to offer each of them a deal sufficiently enticing to keep them on board yet not juicy enough to promise undue advantage over jealous and ever-watchful rivals.
A very tricky balance. But failure could be worse for the entire center-right, so Lecornu may just have a chanc of succeeding. This is his high card–not quite a trump, and in any case the game is poker, where there are no trumps and bluffing is an essential skill.
Once again Macron is trusting to his luck, which hasn’t really served him well for quite some years now. But gambling addicts never accept that their luck has run out until they go bust.