Is Le Pen for Turning? France Can’t Bank on It
She’s not part of the Macron-Barnier government, and is under no obligation to save it without a budget she can live with.
Excluded from government, but not power.
Photographer: Andrea Savorani Neri/NurPhoto/Getty Images
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While America took time off to eat turkey, France has been cooking up a black swan. The political melodrama has stretched out for six months, ever since dreadful European election results prompted President Emmanuel Macron to call snap legislative elections. It didn’t work. Much chicanery produced centrist and left-wing tactical alliances designed to thwart Marine Le Pen’s National Rally from taking a majority of seats, thus producing an unworkable parliament divided into three roughly equal blocs — Le Pen and Macron’s groups, plus an ungainly left-wing coalition. It took Macron until September to appoint a prime minister, the center-right technocrat Michel Barnier. He’s spent three months trying to come up with a budget that will gain a majority and start to reel in France’s worryingly indebted finances.