By 1968, he was a member of the UDR. In 1976 he was a rising young star in the RPR. He was elected in 1978 France’s youngest member of parliament, aged 27.

In 2002, he joined the newly created UMP party and was appointed foreign minister under President Jacques Chirac. In 2015, he became a member of Les Républicains — in a gap between his second stint as European Commissioner and his appointment as Monsieur Brexit, the European Union’s chief negotiator on British departure.

We speak of course of Michel Barnier, detested by British Brexiteers, admired by British Remainers. Is Barnier an ideologically adjustable Vicar of Bray, version française? No, not at all. Barnier has belonged to five parties but never changed his political coat. The Gaullist or wider centre-Right movements repeatedly altered their names and their geometry. Barnier remained loyal to all of them.

Six months before a compelling French presidential election, Michel Barnier’s party-political life-story is significant for two reasons.

Firstly, it helps to explain why Barnier has emerged as favourite to be chosen as the presidential candidate of the main French centre-Right party in a closed primary in early December. The 90,000 or so “militants” (members) of Les Républicains (LR) face a choice on 4 December between three no-hopers and three uninspiring, senior candidates, two of whom left the party four years ago. Internal polls suggest that members are turning — more in desperation than in expectation — to Barnier, a man who has always stuck by the party (whatever its name or policy du jour happened to be).

Secondly, the potted history of Barnier’s life and times also explains why Barnier, aged 70, may never be the President of the Republic. If he does become the centre-Right nominee, he could yet be the man who saves his political family from oblivion. More likely, he may be remembered as the last chieftain of a troubled, political dynasty which stretches from Charles de Gaulle to Nicolas Sarkozy.

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Macron, the failed Machiavelli

By John Lichfield

After decades of shape-shifting, dividing, uniting, back-stabbing, trampling spending rules, breaking the law, the French centre-Right is running out of ideological and electoral road. Part of its territory — nationalist, anti-European, anti-migration, socially conservative — was conquered years ago by Marine Le Pen. Another part, liberal socially and economically, pro-European, was annexed in 2017 by Emmanuel Macron. A further chunk of harder centre-Right opinion, more educated and better-heeled than Lepennist voters, is migrating to the xenophobic essayist and TV pundit, Eric Zemmour.

As a result, none of the leading contenders to be the Les Républicains’s candidate in the first round of the presidential election on 10 April is sure of reaching the two-candidate second round on 24 April.

Best placed in national — as opposed to internal — opinion polls is Xavier Bertrand, president of the northern French region, Hauts-de-France, followed by Valérie Pécresse, president of the greater Paris region, Ile-de-France. Michel Barnier comes a poor third — with an average of polls giving him only 11% of the Round One vote, far short of the likely 17 to 20% “entry ticket” to Round Two.

Why would LR party members vote for the “weakest” candidate nationally in their closed primary on 4 December? Is this another example of the perpetual instinct for self-harm of French small-c conservatives — once described as the “stupidest centre Right” in the world?

Possibly. Then again, the election is six months away; public opinion is relatively volatile; only 60% of those questioned offer an opinion to pollsters; and Zemmour’s rapid rise could prove as ephemeral as similar irruptions in past French presidential elections.

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Barnier’s supporters point to the fact that his candidature was mocked when he entered the race in August. He was, many pundits said, too dull, too closely associated with Brussels and too little known in France to win the centre-Right nomination. Yet two months later, he looks odds-on to be selected. According to an internal poll, Barnier is approved by 58% of LR members, Pécresse by 52%, and Bertrand by only 38%.

Other than his unbroken membership of Gaullist parties for half a century, Barnier has seduced the LR membership. He could be “our Joe Biden,” they suggest — old and underestimated. Others say that the tall, patrician-looking Barnier has “the face of a President”. In other words, he is not the bland Xavier Bertrand and he is not Valerie Pécresse; competent, likeable but undeniably and — unacceptably to many French conservatives — a woman.

Barnier has also pulled off a great coup, which could yet come back to haunt him. He has called for a referendum on whether France should suspend parts of the EU and Council of Europe treaties to allow a three to-five-year moratorium on migration (though not asylum seeking).

This was greeted by the British media — and some in France — as an act of breath-taking hypocrisy. After years of lecturing the British on the drawbacks of leaving the EU, here was Barnier suggesting that France should step outside the European treaties to “take back control” of immigration policy.

The truth is a little more complicated. Barnier’s point is that the EU has no coherent policy for external immigration and therefore national governments should have the right to create their own. As things stand, he says, the European courts interpret their respective treaties in ways that make this impossible.

The EU referendum initiative, however limited, changed Barnier’s image as an uncompromising Brussels technocrat. It gave him a role — before the rise of Zemmour — in the debate on migration which may shape the election. On both counts, it endeared Barnier to the harder line members who remain in the French centre-Right.

On other issues, however, he remains a fervent European. He called last weekend for the increased “mutualisation” of national economic policies to prevent Europe from being marginalised by China and the United States in the decades ahead.

If Barnier does win Les Républicains nomination, his apparent ambivalence on Europe will be lambasted by Zemmour, Le Pen and by some Left-wing candidates as an example of elitist group-think. The idea of a “mutualised” Europe may also jar with many members of Les Républicains. What remains of the party is close to LePennism.

The nationalist-authoritarian drift of the LR membership is sometimes compared to what happened to the US Republican party under Donald Trump or the British Conservative Party via Boris Johnson and Brexit. There are points of comparison but the battle for the soul of the French centre-Right is much older.

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In 1976, Jacques Chirac created the Rassemblement pour La République (RPR) to replace what was left of the old Gaullist movement — and as a luxury bulldozer for his personal use. The more economically liberal, socially moderate and reformist wing of the centre-Right united loosely behind President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in an alliance called the Union pour la Democratie Francaise (UDF).

Chirac’s party was supposed to be nationalist-authoritarian and rural, socially conservative and economically interventionist. But it had a pro-European, economically liberal wing too. These two broad strands of the French centre-Right cooperated and tripped each other up for two decades. Chirac seesawed from one viewpoint to the other (while funding the RPR party by embezzling millions of francs from the Paris town hall where he was mayor).

In 2002, after Marine Le Pen’s father reached the second round of the Presidential election, Chirac skilfully exploited the crisis to merge his RPR with part of the more European-minded UDF.

This new centre-Right party (the UMP) was hijacked by Nicolas Sarkozy before his presidential victory in 2007. Like Chirac — but more energetically — Sarkozy attempted to ride the twin horses of the French centre-Right. Like Chirac, he played fast and loose with the rules. And like Chirac before him, he was sentenced to jail last month for fraudulently circumventing campaign financing laws.

The French centre-Right adores law and order — for others. The last two centre-Right French Presidents were given jail sentences for corruption. Three of the last six French centre-Right prime ministers have been convicted of criminal offences after leaving office.

This miserable record — three of the last six French centre-Right prime ministers have been convicted of criminal offences after leaving office — has left a legacy of personal loathing within the main centre-Right party to date. The party changed its name to Les Républicains in 2015 to distance itself from a damaged “UMP” brand. But two years later, the centre-Right failed to make the second round of a presidential election for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic. After its candidate, François Fillon, was accused of fiddling his parliamentary expenses, Emmanuel Macron carved off a chunk of the “centrist-liberal-European” wing. Marine Le Pen took some of the nationalist-authoritarians.

Following Macron’s victory, the LR party membership subsided from over 200,000 to 80,000 at the start of this year. It is now 90,000 and rising. This membership surge may or may not allow Bertrand, or less likely, Pécresse, to overtake Barnier and snatch the nomination. Most people’s money is on Barnier.

If he does win, he will take on a heavy, historical responsibility. The 2022 election will be passe ou casse for the battered legacy of De Gaulle, Chirac and Sarkozy. Another failure to reach the second round will hasten the disintegration of Les Républicains. The moderate, pro-European elements will be absorbed into a Greater Macronism. The rest will merge with the far-Right.

This, I believe, is Eric Zemmour’s principal ambition: to do well enough in 2022 to destroy both the LR and Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. A new nationalist, anti-migrant, Eurosceptic movement could then emerge before the next Presidential election in 2027.

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What's behind Macron's fury?

By John Lichfield

Barnier could, however, still prevent the destruction of the movement that he has served since the age of 14. He — or whoever becomes the centre-Right candidate — still has a slim chance of being elected President of the Republic. As things stand, far-Right rivals Le Pen and Zemmour are jostling for second position in the first round on 17% to 20%. The top place seems likely to go to President Macron, whose first-round support is stable on 23-27%.

The second place in Round Two on 24 April could be a three-way lottery until the last moment. Le Pen and Zemmour could cancel each other out and reduce the entry score to something in the high teens — reachable by Barnier, or another Gaullist.

If either Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour qualifies for Round Two, Macron will crush them. The Left and Greens, with around 30% of the vote split seven ways in Round One, will not vote for the far-Right in Round Two. Some will abstain. Most will grumble and vote for Macron.

If Barnier, or another centre-Right candidate, sneaks into Round Two, the result could be very close. Many Left and Green voters loathe Macron. They would vote to dump him on 24 April — and then loathe the new centre-Right president the next day.

Could that be President Barnier?  It remains unlikely. But I no longer think that it’s impossible.

“How could we not feel, as in the darkest times in our history, a deep solidarity with the people of the United States, to whom we are so close, and to whom we owe our freedom?” wrote Jean-Marie Colombani, possibly the then-most powerful opinion-maker in France, in that special grandiloquent style the French adopt to signal momentous thought. In the next paragraph, he warned the West not to fall for the “monstrous hypocrisy” of “finding excuses for the perpetrators of this murderous madness, crediting them with the ‘good intentions’… to avenge the wretched of the world against their supposed sole oppressor, America… They do not want a better, fairer world. They simply want to wipe ours off the map.”

Strong words after the shock of 9/11. The last paragraph of this 1250-word tirade did warn, accurately as it turned out, against escalation — “[the terrorists’] attitude is obviously suicidal. By going to the extremes, they want to force Muslim opinions to ‘choose sides’ against ‘the great Satan’ [and] to spread an unprecedented crisis throughout the Arab world. They want to attract the whirlwind. Our leaders must see the danger of causing the nations these warmongers covet to buy into this suicidal logic.”

Le Monde duly supported the French government’s October 2001 decision to join both the US-led military coalition for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, as well as the NATO international security task force. This, despite France not being bound by NATO’s charter (having been spectacularly pulled out of the Organisation by Charles de Gaulle in 1966), was met by popular support that never rose to jingoism. Both Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist president, and Lionel Jospin, the Socialist PM he’d been forced to take on when his party lost the surprise 1997 General Election, were for once in agreement. France sent 4,000 crack troops. By 2010, the French were the fourth largest contributor to the war in Afghanistan (after the US, UK and Italy).

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Benard-Henri Levy

Not only did France carry her weight during the War on Terror; her expertise on Arab and Islamic terrorism was invaluable, acknowledged by both the Americans and the British. French investigative magistrates draw on over half a century’s experience with every variety of bloody attacks: during the Algerian War of Independence in the 1950s-1960s; Left-wing Palestinian in the 1970s; Iranian in the 1980s; Algerian again in the 1990s as France became the hinterland of the 1992-2000 civil war in her former colony. When 9/11 came, only the scope of it was different from what the juges d’instruction had been working on for decades.

The French decision to leave Afghanistan in 2012, was met with relative public indifference, which is a more normal response The Constitution of the Fifth Republic, tailored to Charles de Gaulle’s specific measurements, states (Art. 15) that the President of the Republic is “the head of the armed forces, decides on the use of military force and to this end has the responsibility and the power to engage nuclear forces if necessary”. Essentially, the otherwise-ornery French have left successive presidents to it. Even before Jacques Chirac put an end to conscription in 2002, there were next to no protests when the French military, including conscripts, were deployed in Lebanon, Chad, Kosovo or Bosnia.

The French see their military (and nuclear capacity) as part of a cherished mental dreamland: it’s the last acceptable refuge of the Grandeur invoked from Louis XIV to Le Général. This Grandeur sublimates France from mid-size power to major player, with a seat at the Security Council, an impressive armaments industry for a country of 67 million people, a capacity of foreign deployment roughly similar to the UK’s (currently 17,000 troops from the North Sea to the Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, Syria and the Baltics), and the respect of her soldierly peers. From the 19th century, the French Army, whose officers signally refused to back populist leaders like Général Boulanger, has been known as La Grande Muette (The Great Mute): this held during the Algerian Independence war when two generals-led military coups ended in ignominious failure. It’s the civilians, not the military, who, from Danton to the Yellow vests, try to overturn the Republic.

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Marine Le Pen's daddy issues

By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Predictably, perhaps, the post World Trade Center transatlantic love affair soured fast. Dominique de Villepin, Chirac’s grand-standing Foreign Secretary (an obsessive collector of Napoleoniana, he has taken on some of the traits of his hero), came to speak to the UN General Assembly one year after the attacks, on 12 September 2002, and again on 14 February 2003, to urge jaw-jaw and not war. He brushed off any illusion that, after Afghanistan, France would also join the coalition to unseat Saddam Hussein from his quarter century iron rule over Iraq. The French sat out the Iraqi war, earning themselves a variety of soubriquets, the nicest of which, “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, had been stolen from The Simpsons.

As it turned out, France was right, but for an unholy combination of cleverness and wrong-headedness. The French, who over the years had furnished Saddam with some $5.1 billion’s worth of weapons for his eight-year-war against Iran, not including the making of his fledgling nuclear capacity, also knew that Germany had built the plants that enabled Iraq to manufacture the Sarin and Tabun gas that killed 5,000 Kurds at Halabja. In other words, if anyone knew that Saddam Hussein was in the process of obtaining WMD, they sat in government offices in Paris — none more so than Jacques Chirac, who’d started cultivating the Baath ruler of Iraq since 1974. The French pushback against “Iraqi Freedom”, which would turn out to be an inspired decision, and keep us out of that mess, was more motivated by deep cynicism than by the romantic illusion that deposing a brutal Middle-Eastern dictator would start “a virtuous circle of democracy” in the area. (Prof. Bernard Lewis’s phrase.)

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Like every French president and Foreign secretary since de Gaulle, Chirac and Villepin prided themselves in understanding what they saw as the realities of the Middle East. The Quai d’Orsay, the French Foreign Ministry, has long pushed la politique arabe de la France. This is a mix of heady Gallic Orientalism, cold calculations (all those Mirage and Super-Étendard planes, Exocet missiles, helicopters, air-to-surface guided missiles, and more), power assessment, and entrenched underlying anti-Americanism (which often lumps the British in the Anglo-Saxon package).

It’s also arguable that the practice of French politics (the alliances, the reversals, the treasons, the conviction that idealism is for mugs) is much closer to Near East traditions than to the Jeffersonian (or Burkean) approach. It remains that French scepticism, in this instance, was inspired.

He had, however, made a minor adjustment to pension rules which meant that Madeleine, our next-door neighbour in Normandy, Clare’s surrogate grandmother, had been obliged to return to work. In Madeleine’s frequent absences a semi-wild cat that she and Clare had befriended had vanished, presumed dead. So, Madeleine concluded, Monsieur Raffarin was to blame for the death of their cat.

The constitution and conventions of the French Fifth Republic provide for a double-headed, or chauffeur-driven, government. The president is in power but not at the wheel; the prime minister runs the country day-to-day. The president controls foreign and defence policy and sets the course for the nation. In Charles de Gaulle’s conception of things, it was the prime minister’s job to deal with “events, dear boy,” and become unpopular. The president should remain aloof, monarchical and — in theory — adored by his people. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, in becoming the object of blame for the death of a semi-wild cat, was doing more or less what Le Général had intended. 

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The slow death of French cheese

By John Lichfield

That was 18 years ago. If the same incident occurred today, there is no doubt who would be to blame — not Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, but President Emmanuel Macron. Something has gone awry with De Gaulle’s grand plan, now 61 years old, for governing a country that he thought was ungovernable.

The age of Facebook and Twitter, the decay of the traditional media, and the decline of deference, has made the notion of wholesale power without detailed responsibility unsustainable. The French people now take the view that they elect a president to run the country — not just to represent and guide the nation. If things go wrong, even if they do not go very wrong, it is the president in the Elysée Palace that they blame; they tend to be forgiving, or indifferent, towards the man (there has only once been a woman) in the Palais Matignon, the home and office of the prime minister.

President François Mitterrand (in power 1981-1995) was probably the last French head of state to make De Gaulle’s concept work, though some argue that it never did work very well. Jacques Chirac (1995-2012), Raffarin’s boss, took a detached view of daily politics, but still became unpopular — until he died last year at which point France discovered that it had always loved him deeply. Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12) tried, in effect, to be his own prime minister. Ditto François Hollande (2012-16). Both were one-term presidents.

Emmanuel Macron (2016- ), by declaring himself “Jupiter,” tried to revive something of the Gaullist presidential mystique — and immunity from 24-hour news. He has failed.

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By Aris Roussinos

Consider two recent opinion polls, researched during France’s coronavirus lockdown, which ended on Tuesday. (Disparities between polls are common in France.) Ifop-Fiducial for Paris Match found on 2 June that President Emmanuel Macron’s approval rating was 40% (no change). Prime Minister Edouard Philippe’s was 53% (up 7 points). Odoxa for France Inter found, on 26 May, that Macron’s rating was 35% (down 7 points), while Philippe’s was 46% (no change).

There have been opinion polls showing prime ministers to be more popular than presidents in the past — but an 11 to 13 point gap is exceptional. Macron has received the blame for what has gone wrong in France’s response to the Covid crisis, even though France has got many things right. Philippe, who has been in day-to-day control and was personally responsible for at least one bad decision, has prospered in popular opinion. He is seen as a likeable man and a safe pair of hands.

Philippe’s new-found popularity comes at an awkward time for Macron. The President knows that the economic after-shock of the Covid crisis will undermine his hopes of re-election in two years’ time. He is tempted to do what Fifth Republic heads of state have often done — to relaunch his presidency by changing his prime minister. But how can Macron dump Philippe when the Prime Minister is the most popular member of the government team? If he does so, might Philippe — a transfer from the centre-Right who never joined Macron’s start-up centrist party — run against the President himself in 2022 and win?

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The conundrum has been greeted with mischievous joy in recent days by opposition politicians from far Right to hard Left. They have taken to  Philippe’s parliamentary speeches and televised press conferences as a way of teasing and embarrassing Macron.

A leading ally of Macron told me: “No decisions have yet been made yet but there will definitely be a Government reshuffle in early July.”

“Macron wants the remaining two years or so of his mandate to take a new direction….something less confrontational, more ecological, probably a little to the Left, something which takes account of the shocks of the Covid crisis.”

Whether Philippe is dumped or carries on is 50:50 at the moment, the Macron ally says. The Prime Minister is a fiscally conservative man of the centre-Right. He may not feel comfortable with the probable new direction of Macron II.

“In any case, Philippe is exhausted,” he said.

“There is no animosity between the two men, despite what you read. Philippe could agree with Macron to quit while he’s ahead. He would then have a good chance of becoming President himself one day….But whatever happens he won’t run against Macron in two years’ time. He’s much too loyal and honourable a man to do that.”

The decision is further complicated by the shortage of compelling candidates to replace Edouard Philippe. Logically, if Macron wants to steer to the Left or to turn green, he needs a prime minister with a leftish lean or a greenish tinge. But who?

The only half-way plausible name to emerge so far is Jean-Yves Le Drian, the foreign minister and former defence minister. Le Drian is a former history teacher and former mayor of Lorient in Brittany. He is Catholic and socialist, from a working-class background — a combination now rare on the French Left. He is competent but dry, a manager rather than an ideologue. He has no known green tendencies.

Le Drian is 72 years old. His promotion would install a rather odd couple at the head of the French government – a 42-year-old president-monarch and a 72-year-old prime-minister-chief-vizier. 

Macron’s youth and political inexperience partly explain why he has never been able to imprint himself on the French collective mind as father of the nation. He has delivered on some of his promises and made several important economic reforms, but there is something in his character that annoys many French people. He has no traditional, grassroots power base and has failed to create one; and his reforms have angered the Left.

His main claims to deserve a second term — a sharp fall in unemployment; a boom in foreign and domestic investment — will be buried by the economic crisis which follows the health crisis (an anticipated 11% fall in France’s GDP this year). Hence the need for Macron, as he said in a televised speech to the nation on 13 April, to “re-invent” himself.

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Can Emmanuel Macron reinvent himself?

By John Lichfield

Macron’s relationship with Philippe has been placed under huge strain by three crises in the last 20 months (more than any other Fifth Republic President has faced). During the original Gilets Jaunes rebellion, of November 2018, Macron was the principal target of provincial working- and middle-class abuse. He felt himself to be isolated and exposed — but nonetheless chose to leave his Jupiterian Mount Olympus to make a successful tour of local town hall meetings. Philippe was little seen.

During the pensions reform crisis of October last year, Philippe was thrust onto the front line. Macron, although the reform was largely his idea, opted to hide. He disliked some of the tactical choices made by Philippe but had to go along with them. Relations between the two began to fray.

During the Covid crisis, Macron has appeared in various guises, or disguises — sometimes standing back, sometimes thrusting himself into the limelight. He made four TV addresses to the nation in the space of a month, from mid-March to mid-April, in which he variously “declared war” and then admitted mistakes and announced that the world would never be the same again.

Meanwhile Philippe made a series of very competent appearances at press conferences and on the TV news, painstakingly explaining the science and the logistics of the Covid crisis. Overall, France has coped better than most similar countries but, unlike Germany, failed to test widely and rapidly. The government initially misled the nation on the reasons for this failure. Philippe and his ministers made more mis-statements than Macron, but Philippe has attracted less of the blame.

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Overall, allies of both men say their relationship has been healthier, and more equal, than between most Fifth Republic presidents and prime ministers. De Gaulle employed three prime ministers in 10 years; George Pompidou had two in five years; Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had two in seven years; Mitterrand seven in 14 years; Chirac 4 in 12 years; Hollande three in five years.

The only president to be “faithful” to a single prime minister was Sarkozy, who patronised and marginalised François Fillon. The two men came to detest one another and took mutual revenge during the centre-Right primaries in 2017 (allowing a young, centrist upstart to become president of the Republic).   

Both Mitterrand (twice) and Chirac (once) were obliged to appoint prime ministers from opposition parties after losing parliamentary elections. These so-called “cohabitations” had the Wizard of Oz effect of revealing that the Fifth Republic constitution actually grants French presidents very few direct powers. Without a majority in the national assembly, they are even more powerless than a US president without a majority in House and Senate.

These three periods when Prime Ministers ruled alone contributed to the de-mystification of the Olympian presidency imagined by De Gaulle. So did Chirac’s selfish decision in 2002 to reduce the presidential term from seven years to five so he could run again, despite his age and failing health. Having presidential and parliamentary terms of the same length linked the presidency to the parliamentary system; it became less of the independent power base that De Gaulle had intended.

In any case, the mediascape and the political zeitgeist has changed utterly since January 1959, when De Gaulle gave up the prime minister’s job to become the first president of the Fifth Republic. It is no longer feasible for a president to be a back-seat driver on all but foreign and defence policy. The role of the prime minister has become unsustainable — a source of instability, of staff intrigue and jealousy, rather than a throwaway shield or detachable front-bumper.

And yet a return to a straightforward parliamentary democracy, with a French chancellor or dominant prime minister, is inconceivable. It would be against French instincts. It would also be against the spirit of the times.

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By Peter Franklin

The French presidential system, for good or ill, suits and reinforces the worldwide twenty-first century decline of political parties. It chimes with the global trend towards charismatic leaders who know how to play on the cynicism and credulity of public opinion.

Macron surfed that mood in his own way in 2017 but he was neither cynical, nor charismatic, nor anti-establishment enough to ride the wave for long. His great fear for the Corona-skewed 2022 election is not a treacherous run by Edouard Philippe, nor even a triumph by Marine Le Pen. He fears the emergence of a bewitching figure from outside the political system. Paradoxically, the double-headed French system of government — giving a would-be charismatic strongman a prime minister to do the dog-work — could make such a candidature more plausible.

That, after all, is more or less how Vladimir Putin translated De Gaulle’s blueprint for government into Russian.