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No-Confidence Vote Fails in France, Leaving Socialist Government Intact France’s Socialist Government Survives a Vote, but Remains Fractured
(about 4 hours later)
PARIS — France’s Socialist government survived a no-confidence vote in the lower house of Parliament on Thursday evening, leaving the government standing but still weakened as demonstrators continued to protest a contested labor law overhaul in cities around the country. PARIS — It was a bad day of the kind that has become distressingly common for President François Hollande.
The motion of no-confidence was supported by 246 representatives in the National Assembly, France’s lower house, failing to reach the required threshold of 288 votes, representing an absolute majority of the 574 lawmakers. The motion was put forward by the right-wing opposition after the French government forced a labor reform bill through the National Assembly without a vote on Tuesday, a step it took after encountering opposition to the legislation from Socialist and other left-leaning lawmakers. Anti-government demonstrators, tear gas and police sirens filled streets again in Paris and other French cities on Thursday, with protesters voicing their opposition to the centerpiece of Mr. Hollande’s domestic agenda, legislation intended to make it easier for employers to hire — and fire — workers.
To do so, the government wielded a rarely-used constitutional provision that allows it to bypass a vote on a bill but enables lawmakers to file a motion of censure. Had the motion passed, the bill would have failed and the Socialist government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls would have been toppled, forcing President François Hollande to form a new one. Members of his own Socialist Party were planning openly to get rid of his government, as were members of the opposition. Less than a year out from the presidential election, analysts vied with each other to pronounce his political death sentence. If the polls conducted and cited by the French news media are to be believed, voters have long since given up on him and his soothing smile, which four years ago seemed to promise a new start for France.
But few expected the no-confidence motion to pass. The right-wing opposition did not have enough votes, and many lawmakers on the left who oppose the labor reform bill, especially those who are also in the Socialist party, stopped short of voting to oust a Socialist government. Mr. Hollande’s smile, like that of the Cheshire cat, may soon be all that is left of him. His government survived a vote of no confidence in the National Assembly Thursday evening, two days after it resorted to a little-used power to force through the sharply contested labor law over opposition from some Socialists and others on the left. But with Mr. Hollande’s support in the presidential race at 13 percent and unemployment still above 10 percent, his chances of re-election, or even of making it to the final round of voting, seem to most analysts to be vanishingly slim.
The bill, which aims to introduce more flexibility into hiring and firing workers, will now head on to the Senate, France’s upper house of Parliament. The battle at this point in many ways has shifted from saving Mr. Hollande’s job to resolving the deep ideological contradictions splitting the Socialists.
Protests over the proposed changes have gripped France over the past weeks. Thousands of demonstrators marched around the country on Thursday, against what they say is an unacceptable weakening of worker protections. On the Left Bank of Paris and in other cities, police fired tear gas to disperse violent protesters and suppress small clashes. Mr. Hollande, by all accounts an affable man with a penchant for sly humor, came into office in 2012 as a high-level party functionary with no particular ideological convictions. He ran on traditional Socialist policies, including a 75-percent top income tax rate on the rich. Yet upon taking office, he tacked toward the center and more market-friendly policies, urged on by reformers within his party who counseled him that he had to begin retrofitting France to the realities of global competition and the long-term unsustainability of a generous social welfare system.
One of those reformers, his present economy minister, Emmanuel Macron, once described the 75 percent proposal as “Cuba without the sunshine,” a remark that highlighted the depth of the split between the centrists and the traditional left, which continued to hew to the language and sometimes the policies of anticapitalist redistribution.
Mr. Hollande has pledged not to run in next year’s election if he is unable to bring the unemployment rate down. So far it has hardly budged, but the president has given indications that he intends to run anyway. If he does and he loses badly, his defeat would most likely provide a spot in the second round of voting to Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far right National Front.
Mr. Hollande’s weakened condition has attracted predators not just on the left of his own party, but on the right as well. Mr. Macron, a former banker who is market-oriented by conviction, has started his own political movement, “On the Way,” much to the irritation of his colleagues in the government. Yet the youthful Mr. Macron — he is only 38 — is way ahead of Mr. Hollande in recent presidential polls cited in the French news media, and only just behind a career mainstream right politician, Alain Juppé, a former prime minister who is currently considered the favorite in the 2017 presidential vote.
Mr. Macron has been mocked in the left-leaning press this week for implicitly comparing himself to Joan of Arc, riding in providentially to save France, at a well-attended speech in Orléans on Sunday.
The labor law that has provoked months of protests here was Mr. Hollande’s 11th hour bid to bring down unemployment. Much weakened from its original form after months of protests, it gives employers more flexibility negotiating hours and wages with workers. The law takes some of that power away from unions — which, except for some of the more moderate ones, are generally enraged by the reform law — and it defines more precisely when and how companies can lay off workers, a process that is currently time consuming and expensive.
The fury against Mr. Hollande in his own party for those efforts — over 50 Socialist members of Parliament tried and failed to file their own motion of no confidence on Wednesday — has left all but destroyed the Socialists, a party already badly weakened and divided.
“The left has ceased to exist, because it doesn’t represent anything,” said Gérard Grunberg, a professor at the Sciences Po political science institute. “There is not one left now, there are a number of lefts,” said Mr. Grunberg. “The party of Mitterrand,” he said, referring to François Mitterrand, the nimble politician who led the Socialists back into power in 1981 after years in the wilderness, “no longer exists.”
The immediate result was “the madness of yesterday,” as Mr. Grunberg put it — Socialists on the party’s far left attempting to eject a Socialist prime minister. “That was something unbelievable,” Mr. Grunberg said. “We’ve never seen that before. They were voting to overthrow their own government.”
That effort failed for lack of lawmakers who were willing to back it, as did Thursday’s motion of censure by the opposition Republicans of the center-right. Yet one of the Socialist rebel leaders — they are called Frondeurs, a reference to 17th century revolutionaries — pledged on Thursday to keep on fighting Mr. Hollande from within his own party.
“It was a very firm warning sent to the government and that is coming from the whole left,” Christian Paul, one of the Socialist rebels, who represents the old region of Mr. Mitterrand, who died in 1996, told French television Thursday. “The left chose Hollande, and it has been disappointed,” Mr. Paul said.
“This is a law of deregulation,” Mr. Paul said. “The French will be less protected, without making it easier for companies to hire.”
Many mainstream economists disagree with Mr. Paul. They say that with all its worker protections, France has effectively enshrined permanent high unemployment. France has made “the choice” of having unemployment, Jean Tirole, a Noble Prize-winning economist, said in an interview with Le Monde this week, adding that the country has “chosen institutions that create unemployment.”
To the deafening sound of police sirens in the streets outside the Parliament building Thursday, Mr. Valls, the prime minister and a pugnacious boxer, defended the labor law. He mocked a Communist deputy who has been loud in opposition, saying, “You’ve been wrong for 100 years.” And he pleaded with the legislators, and the protesters outside, to abandon the assumption of a permanent war between capital and labor.
“How much longer are we going to oppose employers and workers?” Mr. Valls asked. The government merely “wants to allow into the job market, those who are currently excluded. We’ve got to allow our companies to create more jobs.”
The protests, which gathered about 55,000, people on Thursday, according to the Interior Ministry, are scheduled to continue next week.