Saving Private Philippe - The French PM's 'déconfinement' playbook - Part Two

There was a moment during his hour-long address to the National Assembly on 28 April when French PM Edouard Philippe made a comment to the effect that ‘I could have done this on the television or at a press conference, but I came here because you are the nation’.

The background to the process was a very deliberate decision by Philippe to use Article 50.1 of the constitution, an amendment introduced under Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008. It allows the PM to make a declaration to either house which is then followed by a debate. The PM may also ask the chamber to vote on the declaration, but the vote is not a formal vote of confidence and defeat would not force a resignation. The mechanism is very clearly intended as a ‘soft’ version of Article 49.3, where a government can make a key issue a matter of confidence and resignation. Philippe’s decision to use it has many meanings.

While President Macron has made the ‘big’ speeches to the nation in the course of the crisis, its day-to-day running has been left to his PM and certain key ministers. That’s how the Fifth Republic is meant to function, but sometimes in the past Macron (and his predecessors) have been rather more directly involved in matters, with the PM acting as the hinge between the Elysée, ministers, and parliament. There is an abundant literature on the nature of the two-headed executive in France, but the bottom line is that when things go well, the President takes the credit, and when they go badly, the PM takes the flak. Not for nothing is the office known as l’enfer de Matignon. Prime Ministers are expendable and have a shelf-life. Look at any French presidency and the duration of the terms of their PMs and you’ll see that (except during periods of cohabitation) there have always been moments when it has been expedient for the President to dispose of the premier. The only President in recent times who was unable to get rid of his premier was Sarkozy with PM François Fillon. And as every student of French politics knows, only one PM of the Fifth Republic has chosen the moment of his going - Jacques Chirac in 1976.

Now, according to various sources, the Covid-19 pandemic has increased the strain on the relationship between Macron and Philippe, not least because the latter has a series of not altogether competent ministers foisted upon him, at least one of whom fancies himself as a future PM (education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer). The same and other sources have been putting around the idea of a government of national unity to be set up once this phase of the crisis has passed. The problem with that is either that the candidates for such a government are a bunch of has-beens whose appointment would not go down well with the public, or that the potential partners really don’t want to play ball in the run-up to the 2022 presidential election. National unity in the face of a pandemic only goes so far.

Now, television appearances and press conferences are of limited impact. Philippe found that out when he and health minister Olivier Véran held what really turned out to be a two-hour public information lecture on Sunday 19 April to a general chorus of raspberries from press and public alike. If the knives at the Elysée really are being sharpened for Philippe (and a firm and public endorsement by Macron of his PM suggests they may be), then the decision to present the Castex plan to parliament and risk a vote was also about consolidating the PM’s position as chef de la majorité.

In that respect, it worked. Philippe’s statement wasn’t followed by a debate so much as a series of responses from the chairs of the various groupes parlementaires and a handful of others –I’ll come back to that in a moment. The result of the vote that followed was emphatic. Before the sitting, there had been speculation about the dissent among les marcheurs and the possibility of some of them either voting against the government or abstaining. That didn’t happen, in part thanks to the PM’s decision to set aside the debate over the use of the StopCovid app for another occasion. The plan was approved by 368 votes to 100, with 103 abstentions and represented a massive endorsement of the Prime Minister by the majority.

Vote of 28 April on the Castex-Philippe plan
*There are too few Rassemblement National deputies to form their own group. All voted against the government plan.

I mentioned above that public confidence in the government’s response to the crisis is not strong and the announcement that more than 60% of the French consulted for a poll published on the morning of the debate galvanised the opposition into a series of robust attacks. These can be grouped in the following ways.

First come the critics of the méthode Philippe, which is regarded as much too technocratic and top down, lacking in consultation. For these critics, the Castex plan is typical of the current government’s modus operandi. The plan comes first, then there is a vague attempt at consultation, not the other way around. There is some validity to this and it didn’t help that, ahead of the debate, deputies had no more than a couple of hours to read and digest the plan.

Secondly, there are the critics who interpret the government’s handling of the crisis as always ‘too little and too late’. The procurement of masks and tests, for example, is as much under the spotlight in France as it is in the UK. But above all, the government’s opponents in the Assembly on 28 April pointed to various presidential outings at the beginning of the crisis, of government vacillation over the wearing of masks, of general lack of clarity. This is, of course, the basic currency of any political opposition, forgetting their own shortcomings while tackling those of a government that should be endowed with foresight and a crystal ball. And the level of general amnesia about the first round of the municipal elections, which Macron wanted to postpone but pretty much everyone else insisted must go ahead (along with sporting events, keeping borders open and so forth) has been breathtaking.

That is not to say that the French government’s handling of the crisis has been good. It hasn’t. For example, the French police were handed an excellent opportunity with the attestation to rebuild bridges with the public after the Gilets Jaunes debacle by showing common sense. That has been an epic fail and the responsibility lies with interior minister Christophe Castaner, who lost whatever grip he had on the police early on in the Gilets Jaunes crisis and has never got it back. Similarly, Blanquer’s handling of the education side of the argument has been garbled. The return to school on 11 May for certain categories of pupil must have some sort of reasoning behind it, but that has yet to emerge.

And the number of people dying in EHPADs (Etablissment d’hébergement des personnes agées dépendantes, since you ask, pronounced épade), the French equivalent of care homes, would make your toes curl.

In terms of opposition, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen have been expectedly outspoken in their different critiques of globalisation and the failures macroniste liberalism. Le Pen has been clutching at some very odd straws, even going so far as to subscribe to conspiracy theories or, rather, to defend people’s democratic right to believe what they want… More predictably, her followers have pointed to violence in some areas that show that the government has gone soft on delinquency. The discourse of the clash of civilisations is bubbling under the surface. Neither really needs to show any leadership, but to sit back and let bad things happen.

The republican right-wing opposition has found itself in a cleft stick. The usual pit-bull figures - Eric Ciotti and Nadine Morano for example - have been unleashed to savage the government, but while more moderate figures such as François Baroin, Christian Jacob or Gérard Larcher have been forthright in their criticism, they have also been pushing for a greater role for local élus in implementing the fight against Covid-19. The Castex plan, with its outline for greater délocalisation of decision making, shows that they have been listened too - up to a point. It is no accident that the first of a series of national consultations following the launch of the plan for easing the lockdown, on Wednesday 29 April, is between Edouard Philippe, the préfets and local government leaders.