Neoliberalism in France Receives a New Blow as Yet Another Government Falls

Europe’s second-largest economy has plunged into political paralysis again, as the French government has been overthrown by yet another no-confidence vote. This time, the no-confidence vote was against Prime Minister François Bayrou and his proposals to reduce the country’s public deficit from a projected 5.4% in 2025 to 4.6% in 2026—and to fall within the European 3% by 2029—with highly unpopular measures that would have included a “freeze” on government spending, over 5.3 billion euros in cuts to local authorities, and 5 billion euros in cuts in the country’s healthcare budget, yet with plans underway to significantly boost defense spending in the next few years. Bayrou’s 2026 budget envisaged in total around 44 billion euros ($51.3 billion) in cuts, tax increases, and even the scrapping of two public holidays, with the latter stirring as much outcry in France as the austerity budget itself.

Essentially, France has now lost its third prime minister in 12 months as political parties from the far-right National Rally (RN) to the hard-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) refuse to back draconian budget proposals as a means of addressing the country’s financial woes. The collapse of the Bayrou government was not a surprise, and some of us had even predicted that it would “meet the same fate” as the government that preceded it, namely that of Michel Barnier. Indeed, there is no other country in Europe with continuous anti-neoliberal struggles as France. Opposition to the normalization of the neoliberal socioeconomic reality has been in constant motion since the mid-1990s when President Jacques Chirac launched a direct attack on the foundational principles of the welfare state.

However, since assuming the presidency in 2017, Emmanuel Macron and his various governments (France has a semi-presidential system) have sought to shove neoliberalism down people’s throats at a record-breaking speed. Unsurprisingly enough, in a recent IFOP poll conducted for Le Journal du Dimanche, French President Emmanuel Macron and his now ousted Prime Minister François Bayrou emerged as the most unpopular leadership duo in the history of the Fifth Republic.

On August 25, Bayrou, who wanted to be known as “Mr. Anti-Debt,” stunned even his political allies when he announced that he would call for a vote in the National Assembly for his neoliberal budget proposals to rescue France from its ailing finances. It was a political grenade that no one had expected. Moreover, Bayrou did so even though he was fully aware of the fact that he was not, in all likelihood, going to avoid the collapse of his government. In fact, he seems to have predicted the outcome of the confidence vote on Monday, September 8, when he said on a radio interview just a few days earlier, in a rather philosophical and quintessentially French fashion, that “there are worse disasters in life than the collapse of the government.”

The most obvious reason why Bayrou gambled with a confidence vote on his plans to reduce France’s public deficit is because he had miscalculated all along the concerns of the French people about deficits and debt. He had embarked on a PR campaign to convince the public that the future of France was at stake on account on the nation’s worrying state of financial affairs. He employed distressful images by invoking the Greek debt crisis of the early 2010s as a warning of what might happen to France and spoke with an apparent earnestness of the possibility of a market meltdown if the French government failed to act boldly and quickly. In his speech to the National Assembly ahead of the confidence vote, Bayrou said that France’s excessive debt load is “life-threatening.”

Yet, typical of neoliberal attitudes and self-serving policies, Bayrou failed all along to realize that while the average French citizens were not insensitive to the realities of the country running a budget deficit of 5.8% of GDP and a national debt of 114% of GDP, they found socially unacceptable the neoliberal economic measures proposed for addressing its financial woes. One could say that, from their own point of view, if the organization of the economy along the principles of neoliberal capitalism is the cause of France’s financial woes, then neoliberalism certainly could not be the answer to their solution. Indeed, an IFOP survey conducted in July found that 57% of respondents believed that a plan was needed to reduce the country’s public deficit and national debt, but only 26% found the measures to be “just.”

The French people, from the far-right to the far-left, have made it very clear that they do not consider neoliberal policies as a remedy either to economic problems such as unemployment or to financial situations like public deficits and national debt.

As a matter of fact, both Bayrou and Macron failed to grasp the fact that it is neoliberalism itself that has fueled the surge both of RN and the New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of left-wing parties that won the largest number of seats in the snap parliamentary election that was held in July 2024, even if the far-right and the hard-left are worlds apart in terms of the overall social and political values that they embrace and advocate.

There is, however, an additional and probably more important reason why Bayrou gambled on a confidence vote over his neoliberal budget proposal even though he knew that the odds of carrying the day were stacked against him. He was hoping that his decision to do so would compel lawmakers in the National Assembly to think twice about toppling his government by reflecting on the impeding consequences stemming from the planned actions of the grassroots protest movement organized around the cry “Block everything” (“Bloquons tout”), scheduled for September 10. The movement’s organizers hope to bring the country to a complete standstill (which, coincidentally, is what the US needs in light of the autocratic actions of President Donald Trump which are turning the country into a third world dictatorship), but the prevailing climate in French politics and society is such these days that even mainstream political parties have offered backing to this nationwide shutdown that will, apparently, take place even with the collapse of the Bayrou government.

Love it or hate it, one must agree that French politics is never boring. More important, the protest movements in the country—starting at least with the French opposition to the Algerian war, later on with the May ’68 events and more recently with the yellow vest protests and now with the new protest movement dubbed “Block everything”--should provide tremendous inspiration to popular struggles against exploitation, oppression, and social injustices everywhere in the world.

What French President Emmanuel Macron’s move might be following the collapse of Bayrou’s government remains to be seen. Nonetheless, it would be politically naive of him to think that a new government will fare better in the future if it insists on pushing neoliberal measures as a solution to the country’s financial woes. For the French people, from the far-right to the far-left, have made it very clear that they do not consider neoliberal policies as a remedy either to economic problems such as unemployment or to financial situations like public deficits and national debt.

Indeed, even the center-right in France, which in recent years has rallied around Emmanuel Macron and his neoliberal vision, has generally been very cautious about the Anglo-American economic model with its attack on government and worship of the market. No doubt, this is why the prevailing sentiment in France is that not only Macron’s governments cannot sustain themselves in the current political climate but that Macron himself is finished and must go.