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00:00Let's cross the channel for an outsider's eye on all of this.
00:03Andrew Smith, lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.
00:08Thank you for being with us here on France 24.
00:12Cheers.
00:13I have good news for you, Andrew.
00:14If before you went on vacation, you were worried that you might have to update your syllabus,
00:18it's not the case.
00:19We still don't have a prime minister.
00:22It's extraordinary, isn't it?
00:23It's this sudden moment.
00:24The Olympic truce has been running.
00:26You've had this moment of real celebration, the summer holidays.
00:29And there is a real sense, I think, today of people getting back to work, of this kind
00:33of entrée, the idea of going back to school, but also of politics needing to click back
00:37into action as well.
00:39And it's been quite extraordinary watching some of the kind of political coverage as
00:43these convoys arrive at the Elysée Palace.
00:46And it seems like you've got these suitors to the king suddenly talking about who will
00:50be given the reins of power.
00:51And I think there is quite a lot to kind of talk about there in terms of what's going
00:55on and who controls this.
00:56I think, you know, you've got Emmanuel Macron who is trying to remind people that there
01:01is no government without the president in France.
01:03Essentially, you've got this big game of musical chairs going on, but he's the constant presence
01:08at the center of it and the one that controls the music.
01:11So I think he is trying to reclaim the initiative and reclaim the political center stage at
01:15this moment when everyone is kind of reentering politics.
01:19Of course, the president did lose the elections on paper, at least.
01:25And in the past, you've had power sharing, what they call cohabitation in this country.
01:31And there he had to hand the reins to a clear leader of the opposition.
01:36This time around, he's taking his time.
01:38Yeah, it's a challenging one.
01:41You have this odd situation.
01:42Of course, we know the Gaullist Fifth Republic is essentially set up in such a way that the
01:47public finds a majority.
01:49The French people create those majorities in the National Assembly, in Parliament.
01:55That's not down to politicians on the whole.
01:57That's not down to anyone.
01:58And in those situations of cohabitation you've mentioned in the past, there's been a fairly
02:03clear situation that says, okay, this party essentially won that election, and they will
02:09govern.
02:10One of the issues we've had is in the last legislatives, if we actually talk about who
02:14won, well, really, the person that won was everyone that opposed Emmanuel Macron.
02:19And the difficulty is the largest party is an electoral alliance, the New Popular Front,
02:23of course, featuring this union of left parties, but also featuring the kind of far left and
02:28France Insoumise, France Unbowed.
02:29And it's one of the problems you have, as we've seen in recent days emerge.
02:33Of course, on Friday, Emmanuel Macron kind of symbolically considered their pick for
02:38prime minister and essentially said, well, it's not going to work because it will be
02:42censured and vetoed effectively by the rest of government.
02:45It'll be voted down before it can ever sit.
02:48And so in his mind, he wants to protect the institutions.
02:51That's his claim, and find a candidate for prime minister who actually could survive
02:56that test of being censured by the parliament.
02:59Why didn't he just name the one that the largest bloc, as you say, put forth, let that candidate
03:07fall on its sword in parliament, and then start again, give him a clear hand?
03:11Yes, a useful one, isn't it?
03:14Why not just have a go and see what happens?
03:18Essentially the interview with Lucie Castaix, the pick for prime minister from the New
03:23Popular Front left alliance, is a kind of former civil servant, left oriented, but not
03:30necessarily tied to the politics of the far left.
03:33And it was seen that she was quite a good compromise candidate across the left wing
03:38alliance.
03:39The difficulty you had essentially Macron was trying to figure out whether the far left
03:44would have ministries under a potential Castaix government.
03:49And she said, you know, that's certainly something that would happen.
03:50They would govern according to the program that was agreed by the New Popular Front.
03:55And that was the moment in which he called it.
03:57Now, controlling the idea here, controlling the timetable, the schedule, is the one thing
04:02Emmanuel Macron really has at this moment.
04:04And he's trying to use this against the left a number of times.
04:08Of course, with the legislative elections, when he called them after his surprise dissolution,
04:13he kind of hoped essentially the left wouldn't have time to unite.
04:16They did.
04:17He hoped essentially that the left wouldn't be able to come together and nominate a candidate
04:22for prime minister.
04:23And we saw, of course, there was a lot of ruction around that.
04:26But they did manage it.
04:27They did declare this was going to be the candidate they would support.
04:31And so it seems perhaps, again, like one of the ways he could potentially find a route
04:34through this crisis is by nibbling off support from the social democratic center of the Parti
04:41Socialiste, of course, on the right of the left wing alliance, if you will, who he might
04:45be able to convince to support a different sort of candidate.
04:48And so this is perhaps him again playing with that timetable, playing with the schedule,
04:53and gambling that the kind of divides within the new popular front may be something that
04:57allows him to impose his politics on the National Assembly.
05:01Of course, what goes around comes around.
05:04Macron was finance minister under François Hollande.
05:07The two don't get along very well, even though the former president was invited today to
05:14the Elysee Palace.
05:17Hollande's last prime minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, he's also had his words in the past with Macron.
05:24It was sort of a stillborn idea trying to get Cazeneuve in as prime minister to divide
05:30the socialists.
05:32It was, I think, a little bit.
05:33And it's a challenging one.
05:34It seemed for a while that this was the candidacy that might work.
05:37Like you mentioned, there is some kind of discernible difference.
05:41This wouldn't just be Macronism, but would be a shift towards not handing over the reins
05:46of power, as it were, but giving up a little bit more space towards the center left of
05:51the Socialist Party.
05:52We know, of course, Hollande's re-entered politics during the legislatives.
05:56We've seen Cazeneuve say that, actually, this would be something where if you were to govern,
06:00it would be with an eye on what the people had voted for in the legislatives.
06:04It couldn't just be a continuation of Macron's policy.
06:08But there has been a lot of criticism of that potential.
06:11We saw some of that come, of course, from the far left.
06:14We saw deputies of France Insoumise say that this really would be beyond the pale, as it
06:20were.
06:21And we also saw Nicolas Sarkozy, of course, another former president whom Emmanuel Macron
06:24spoke to, saying this represented what he called the dying gasps of Hollandeism, and
06:29the idea that this was only a hearkening back to the past.
06:33And that, I think, is something important as well.
06:34Of course, he's had former President Sarkozy to speak to, who we know is a kind of consigliere
06:41of the right, a very influential figure across many people in the center-right.
06:45And of course, Xavier Bertrand as well, another candidate at one point to become the leader
06:51of the center-right, and another prominent figure within that moment.
06:55It looks to me less like he would be having Bertrand as a potential pick for prime minister,
07:01as well as that would alienate so many other rivals within the center-right, especially
07:05Laurent Wauquiez, who's one of the big figures on the Republicans.
07:10So many internal divides there that it would seem not necessarily the best of picks immediately
07:16for prime minister.
07:17So more likely for me that he's speaking to the center-right, Sarkozy and Xavier Bertrand,
07:23and trying to see if they will stomach some of the candidates he's likely to put forward
07:27for prime minister for them.
07:29Essentially trying this as a kind of focus group of former presidents, prime ministers,
07:33and party grandees to see if those political families might accept the kind of figure he
07:38would put forward.
07:39Yeah.
07:40So taking his time, you mentioned at the outset that this is a constitution put forth by Charles
07:47de Gaulle in 1958.
07:50When the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, visited the Élysée Palace last week, was
07:56he visiting Charles de Gaulle's country, or was he visiting Napoleon Bonaparte's country?
08:01I ask the question because, you know, as we said at the outset, it's first day of school.
08:07The high civil service is at its desk.
08:09The institutions are running.
08:13Your thoughts?
08:14Yeah.
08:15It's a challenge, isn't it?
08:16Because, I mean, technically this is a moment where we are seeing sort of this kind of running
08:21stress test of the constitution.
08:23We know there are things existing.
08:25But it doesn't feel like there's a power vacuum, is what I'm saying.
08:28Exactly.
08:29Yeah.
08:30This is very much the idea that the prime minister, I mean, the prime minister at the
08:32moment, the outgoing prime minister who has already tendered his resignation and is still
08:36hanging on in there, apparently at the Élysée right now, Gabriel Attal, was always seen
08:41not as somebody who was a figurehead, not as somebody who was the kind of the leader
08:44of the country, but more as really kind of using his former role as spokesperson for
08:49Macron's majority, but actually sitting there in the assembly.
08:52So there, that seems very kind of bonapartist, I guess, that's a useful way to think about
08:57it, perhaps.
08:58And it is really this idea of the constitution being tested.
09:01We know there are limits on, for example, when the budget needs to be submitted.
09:05But are those limits of the constitution?
09:07Or are they part of the kind of organic law, essentially the kind of the practices and
09:10precedents governing how the constitution is assembled?
09:13There may be challenges to that as well, if there's a delay to the passing of a budget.
09:17And actually, we see the public reacting to this in quite a strange way as well.
09:21There is, of course, a lot of anger about what's happening, and a question of legitimacy.
09:26Like you mentioned, the idea of what are politicians doing at this precise moment?
09:29But one of the interesting things is we've seen some of the polling that's just happened,
09:32the Élab polling that just took place last week or so, and the idea that almost 67% of
09:37French people would support an idea of a technocratic government.
09:40And this seems to be one of the things that Macron is trying to push through, finding
09:43somebody, some figure that won't alienate too many on the left and too many on the right.
09:48And that's where some of those names have started to be kind of floated out there.
09:52We've seen in Le Monde today, Thierry Baudet, the president of the Economic, Social, and
09:55Environmental Council, has been floated as another kind of potential candidate, with
10:00also somebody who might be a potential chief of staff, which makes it seem quite an advanced
10:05rumor, as it were.
10:06And that's the kind of figure who is broadly oriented to the left, came out against the
10:10far right, but is potentially the kind of person that could be accepted.
10:14Now, we know that France is not the Netherlands.
10:17France is not Belgium.
10:18France is not Italy.
10:19It cannot continue with this idea of a caretaker government running current affairs and day-to-day
10:25events in perpetuity.
10:27France needs to find a figure in which they can actually believe, a figure who will communicate
10:32those policies.
10:33And, as you say, if there is to be democratic legitimacy for the parliament, that cannot
10:38simply be the president.
10:40He has a role.
10:41The parliament equally has a role.
10:43And that is something, I think, that is really up for grabs at the moment and actually needs
10:46to be defended.
10:48That legitimacy and that political role for the parliament is something that is absolutely
10:52crucial in this moment.
10:53And that's a big danger for what Macron is trying to do, playing this delaying tactic
10:58with the schedule and really risking the idea of the political legitimacy of the government
11:03itself.
11:04Long term, that type of kind of staggering caretaker government will only strengthen
11:08the political extremes and likely lead to a broader political unrest, as we've seen
11:13in previous years.
11:15Andrew Smith, many thanks for speaking with us from London.
11:19Stay with us.
11:20There's much more to come.
11:21More news, plus the day's business and in sports, the latest on the Paralympics taking
11:26place here in France.