The snap legislative elections called by French President Emmanuel Macron left the country with a hung parliament and no dominant political bloc in power in the lower-house National Assembly for the first time in France's modern history. One solution proposed to end the deadlock is for a government of experts, or “technocrats”, to take care of the business of government until a coalition can be forged.
Faced with the lack of a governing majority in parliament, President Macron on Tuesday asked outgoing Prime Minister Gabriel Attal to head a caretaker government to handle day-to-day affairs, an interim administration likely to continue at least until after the Paris Olympics running from July 26 to August 11.
Macron also asked Attal to try to broker a larger coalition able to muster a “solid” majority in the National Assembly by reaching out to the more moderate groups from the leftist New Popular Front alliance, the broad coalition that won the most seats but has not been able to agree on a prime minister given that it spans the political spectrum from the hard-left France Unbowed to the centre-left Socialist Party.
In a July 11 Odoxa opinion poll of the French electorate, a coalition government was the preferred choice to resolve the current stalemate with 43% approval. A “technocrat government” made up of senior civil servants and experts from civil society received 29% support followed by the uneasy “cohabitation” option – a power-sharing arrangement between Macron’s coalition and those from the New Popular Front – with 27% support.
Sixty percent of the French electorate criticised Macron’s decision to dissolve parliament.
Political groups from both the left or the right have thus far shown little inclination to act in a spirit of compromise to get a new coalition up and running.
Above all, few party leaders want to come to the aid of the unpopular president, whose centre-right group finished second in the recent elections, winning 168 seats, down from 264 in the previous Assembly.
If parliament remains deadlocked, making it impossible to pass key legislation like the upcoming budget, Macron may be tempted to take inspiration from Italy, which has had several technocrat-led governments since the early 1990s – the last of which was headed by the former president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, from 2021-2022.
Theoretically composed of non-partisan ministers – experts and technocrats – such a cabinet would manage the daily business of government and implement consensual reforms.
The arrangement has never been tried under France’s Fifth Republic.
One advantage of a nonpartisan technocratic cabinet is that MPs would be able to distance themselves from “some of the responsibility for difficult decisions to be taken”, according to Benjamin Morel, political scientist and lecturer in public law at Paris-Panthéon-Assas University.
A vote approving the budget, for example, would be less contentious if the legislation had the backing of a broad coalition that supported the expert cabinet, Morel notes.
But unlike the current caretaker government under Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, a “technocratic government” could be toppled by a vote of no confidence in parliament since it requires only a simple majority vote of MPs.
Christophe Bouillard, a professor at Sciences Po Grenoble and a specialist in Italian politics, believes it unlikely that France would install a technocratic government of the kind that has governed several times in Italy.
In Italy such “governments of experts” are associated with imposing austerity measures to shore up public finances and get ballooning debt levels under control, says Bouillard. The Italian public, he says, “had been prepared” for the budget austerity of technocratic governments by “years of media coverage” on the cost of servicing the rising public debt.
The French public, on the other hand, is “absolutely not” prepared for any significant cuts to social services, Bouillard says, in part because public finances have so far been a minor issue for the French media.
This has been true despite the European Commission reprimanding France in mid-June for breaching the European Union's budget rules with its high deficit, which could engender fines for excess spending.
Politicians from the far right who call for the appointment of a technocratic government have their own agendas, Bouillard says. In an interview on RMC radio last week, National Rally (RN) Vice-President Sébastien Chenu said that in the current political situation, “No solution is satisfactory, other than, at best, a kind of technocratic government without a political label.”
This is merely setting a “giant trap”, says Bouillard.
A technocratic government that tried to impose budget-cutting measures would expose the mainstream centre-left or centre-right parties to charges by the RN that they had mismanaged the affairs of government, wasted taxpayers money and should be voted out.
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“This would be preparing a perfect launch pad for the RN to take control of the government” at the next election, says Bouillard. “The RN would be able to portray themselves as saviours.”
He notes that all the parties that supported technocratic governments in Italy were voted out of office at the next election because of public discontent with the policies of austerity.
The only party that did not support the appointment of Draghi’s government in 2021, Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, won parliamentary elections in October 2022 and has been going from strength to strength.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and Reuters)
