Following the unresolved election last month, French President Emmanuel Macron is set to start a series of difficult talks with party leaders on Friday with the goal of assembling a workable ruling coalition.
Six weeks after Macron lost his legislative majority in a snap election, he still hasn’t appointed a new prime minister, whose main responsibility will be to present the budget proposal for the upcoming year to the National Assembly.
After the election, the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP), which became the largest faction, declared its desire for economist Lucie Castets to take over as premier.
Along with other NFP leaders, Castets will be the first political figure to meet with Macron at the Elysee Palace on Friday.
“We’re not going to negotiate with him,” said Manuel Bompard, coordinator of the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party of the upcoming meeting with Macron.
“We’ll tell him that there is no alternative to Lucie Castets’s appointment.”
However, supporters of Macron, who declared that “nobody won” during the election, have contended that the leftist group is too weak to win the prime ministership and are aiming to unite around a centrist candidate.
‘A denial of democracy’
Since Macron declared he would not give the work of choosing a new leader of government priority during the Paris Olympic Games, which concluded on August 11, France has remained without a leader of government for the longest stretch of time following a parliamentary election.
A caretaker administration has been led by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal.
Sen. Yannick Jadot of the Green Party called President Macron’s position “a denial of democracy” and harshly criticized the president for taking so long.
On Thursday, a representative from Macron’s office reaffirmed that “the president is on the side of the French people, the guarantor of the institutions”.
Representatives from a variety of political backgrounds will be present for the Elysee talks, which are set for this Friday and Monday.
Although the president’s administration did not provide a timeframe, analysts anticipate that he will select the prime minister sometime next week.
By October 1, the legal deadline, the person nominated must be able to pass a motion of confidence in parliament and propose a draft law on the 2025 budget to the legislature.
Last month, Macron’s party reached a last-minute deal with right-wing legislators to win a critical vote in parliament, paving the way for the French president to play a larger role in building the country’s next administration than previously expected, Politico reported.
The two political factions formed an impromptu coalition to re-elect Yaël Braun-Pivet as leader of the French National Assembly. The vote was largely seen as a test of who could work together in France’s broken parliament to choose a future prime minister.
By pooling their forces, the centrists and center right gained electoral traction while simultaneously dealing a crushing blow to their opponents further to the left.
Matthieu Hocque, a political expert at Paris’ Millénaire think tank, believes that the victory will make it “more likely” for Macron to bring in a prime minister “from his camp,” explaining that this has always been the case in modern French history.
Source: AlMayadeen
