Long manoeuvring and weeks of negotiations are expected before a new occupant moves into the Hôtel Matignon, seat of the French prime minister.
The left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front (NPF), is most likely to form the basis for a government because it won the largest number of seats, but its lack of an overall majority means that more political instability lies ahead.
The NPF, quickly assembled for the campaign from the radical France Unbowed of Jean-Luc Mélenchon along with the communists, greens and the more moderate socialists, has not even managed to agree on a leader. It is unlikely that Mélenchon will be picked because he is one of the most divisive figures in French politics.
In the meantime, Gabriel Attal, President Macron’s prime minister, continues at the head of a caretaker government.
Possible scenarios for the next French government include:
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1. The NPF agrees on a leader and a programme for government. This would require extensive compromises between the left-wing parties, which have big doctrinal differences. Their election manifesto called for big tax rises to finance lavish increases in the minimum wage and the reversal of Macron’s raising of the pension age. If asked to form a government by Macron, the NPF would be vulnerable from the outset to no-confidence votes from its opponents on the centre and the right, who greatly outnumber it. Losing a so-called “censure vote” in the National Assembly, the lower house, would bring down the government.
2. The NPF could seek a pact with other parties including Macron’s centrist Renaissance party. Discussions would be fraught, given the polarisation of French politics and the country’s lack of experience in parliamentary coalition-building common elsewhere in Europe. Macron’s team has hinted that his party could try to build a coalition of moderates, including the socialists and the greens, but this is unlikely if the soft left remains tied to Mélenchon’s hard-left France Unbowed. No Macron alliance with that party is imaginable.
3. A broader grand coalition, including Macron’s centrist party and moderates from the socialists and the conservative Republicans. It would not involve the populist anti-immigrant party of Marine Le Pen and the more right-wing Republicans who have broken away to join it. This arrangement would be cast as a national unity government that would run the country until a new election which, under the rules, cannot be held until June next year at the earliest.
4. In the absence of any workable administration, Macron could propose the appointment of a “technocrat” caretaker government of experts, consensual public figures and civil servants. Italy has resorted to this in recent years but France has no experience with such an arrangement since the temporary regime that followed liberation from Nazi occupiers in 1944.
