Notes

Another fall in Europe. The government in France collapsed on December 4, after the National Assembly passed a no-confidence motion—and just weeks after the government in Germany fell.

The cabinet, headed by Michel Barnier of the Conservative Party, will go down as the shortest-lived government in the history of the Fifth Republic, founded in 1958—and no government had been ousted by a no-confidence vote in France since 1962.

Two days earlier, Barnier’s minority government had used a constitutional provision to push a 2025 budget through the legislature without a vote. That angered both the far-right National Rally and the bloc of four left-wing parties called the New Popular Front, which together have a majority in the National Assembly.

French President Emmanuel Macron will appoint the next prime minister—and can choose anyone he likes—but with none of the left, right, or center holding a majority in the legislature, any potential cabinet faces a difficult path to confirmation. How did France wind up here?

In October, Matthias Matthijs looked at the pattern of emerging political crises in Europe the situation in France belongs to. Macron made a grave strategic error by calling snap elections in June, after the National Rally’s victory in the European Parliament election earlier that month, Matthijs says—but the sources of France’s growing political instability go deeper, into the public’s loss of confidence in the traditional parties of the center-right and center-left. Now, the electorate has fragmented among several parties ranging from the far right to the far left, making any governing coalition shaky and weak.

—Michael Bluhm