With the French left resurgent this is Macron’s last throw of the dice

This morning, in praising his prime minister, Edouard Philippe – a friend and confidant for the best part of two decades – President Macron couldn’t have been more clear.

“For three years he’s been by my side. We have carried out important, historic reforms, often in very difficult circumstances. We have a relationship of trust that in its way is unique in terms of the French Republic …”

There was no need to add … “and that is why he must go.”

It is normal – or at any rate, not unusual – in the Fifth Republic for presidents to part ways with their prime ministers mid-term. It gives the appearance of a fresh start, most obviously when the President himself is going through a torrid time.

That said, the shocking results of last weekend’s municipal elections, in which Macron’s party, La République En Marche, almost disappeared, swept away by a Green tide, made changes at the top pretty well inevitable.

The new prime minister is to be Jean Castex, a 55-year old from the centre-right, who joined En Marche having previously served as a junior minister under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy.

An Énarque (graduate of the elite École National d’Administration), Castex comes from France’s Deep South, in his case the Pyrenees where, as mayor of the town of Prades, he secured 76%of the popular vote in Sunday’s election. He is regarded as a safe pair of hands – as was Philippe – who in recent months has acted as Macron’s Covid Czar.

The fact that he comes from the right of En Marche and has no obvious history of support for a radical green agenda is perhaps surprising. But he is at least a break from the past and, in addition to shoring up the En Marche vote in the anti-immigrant frontier region, may give Macron the cover he needs to pursue what he described last week as a “new path”.

The coronavirus had already reduced the Government to the political equivalent of a hospital emergency room. Nearly 30,000 people have died, and the economy is in a coma. En Marche, meanwhile, seen by most observers as a personal vehicle for the President, has come to a juddering halt. No matter how often he turns the key in the ignition, the engine refuses to start.

The “resignation” of Philippe, a hard-working administrator whose approval numbers are well ahead of Macron’s, is a measure of the sense of crisis that has gripped the Élysée during the course of the last six months. But it is also an indicator of the frailty of the system. No one truly believes that a hastily organised game of musical chairs in the cabinet room will make a substantive difference to the situation in the country, where faith in the Powers That Be has reached a low ebb.

Events have moved fast. In January, the big issues were two-fold. The President, with the backing of his prime minister, was determined to revolutionise the state-run schemes that for a generation have provided public sector workers with a smooth, trouble-free passage into early retirement. The unions, naturally, were opposed to this and took to the streets in large numbers.

At the same time doctors, nurses and health workers took part in mass protests in support of their claim that they are underpaid and overworked ­ – even before the emergence of Covid-19.

But the Government did not fall. Macron stood firm. He had already seen off the gilets jaunes movement that a year previously had turned the centre of Paris and other major cities into a battle zone. The Yellow Vests, demanding a better deal for ordinary workers, especially those in rural France, had made a mockery of the President’s boast of representing the entirety of France, rich and poor, provincial as well as urban.

Somehow, he survived the assault – though it did his global image considerable damage. And when he emerged, exhausted but in one piece, from the subsequent, union-based protests, it began to look as if he was back on course with a good chance of re-election in the summer of 2022.

What has since done for him is less his response to the coronavirus, for which most French would give him at least a pass mark, than the sense among voters that En Marche is a bit of a con and that it is time, in the immortal words of Monty Python, for “something completely different”.

The Greens have been around in French and European politics for a long time. But it could be that their moment has finally arrived. City administrations are an important part of French government. Mayors are often members of the National Assembly, even ministers. Edouard Philippe, for instance, was re-elected on Sunday as mayor of Le Havre. But now the mayors of Lyon, Bordeaux and Strasbourg are from the Green Party, while in Marseille and Lille eco-based coalitions are in prospect.

And where the Greens failed to triumph there were advances for both left and right. Anne Hidalgo held on as mayor of Paris, while in Perpignan victory went to Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, formerly the National Front. Even the centre-right Republicans, rudderless since the fraud-based fiasco that this week sent their former leader François Fillon to jail, experienced something of a revival.

If parliamentary elections were to be held this month, the strong likelihood is that the Greens, Socialists, Republicans and Le Pennites would each end up with more seats than En Marche. Macron knows that only the appearance of a new beginning, with new faces in high places, can possibly pull the cat out of the bag for him in his bid for a second term.

The environmentalist wing of En Marche, which has been frustrated and increasingly indignant over the last two years, will clearly have to be placated with more seats at the table. Castex, as the new prime minister, will presumably have to make room for at least one more left-leaning colleague, either as finance or interior minister. Recovery from the Covid crisis and the protection of jobs were already the government’s top two priorities, to which the Green Agenda has now been added.

It would be a tall order for anybody. Macron will have been calling in all sorts of favours and examining the CVs of dozens of potential ministers.

Whatever happens, it will be the President’s final throw of the dice. He emerged out of nowhere in 2016. If events do not, finally, turn in his direction, nowhere might well be exactly where he finds himself in 2022.