The movement to impeach and remove President Emmanuel Macron from office after he refused to take the far-left appointee to become prime minister following snap parliamentary elections in July has cleared its first legal hurdle and has officially begun in the French parliament.
On Tuesday morning, the National Assembly voted by a margin of 12-10 to deem the impeachment proceedings against President Macron “admissible” and submit them to a broader parliamentary debate at the Palais Bourbon, the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic that a measure to remove a president has crossed such a threshold. Figaro Reports.
The vote was passed entirely along party lines, with former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon's far-left Insubordinate France (LFI) party winning enough seats on the committee to beat neoliberal lawmakers loyal to Macron and Marine Le Pen's populist National Rally by two votes.
“The Macron faction needed to get used to democracy again,” LFI president Mathilde Pannot said after the vote, adding with joy that “what has just happened is unprecedented in the history of the Fifth Republic.”
The move, first threatened by Messrs. Melonchon and Pannot last month, came in response to Macron's refusal to select members of the New Popular Front (NFP), a coalition of various left-wing parties, including the LFI, hastily formed ahead of July's general elections.
Macron's decision to install as prime minister Michel Barnier, an opponent of Brexit from the centre-right Republican Party, prompted accusations from the Elysée Palace that the NFP, which won the most seats in the National Assembly and formed a strategic voting alliance with Macron to thwart the emerging Rally National from taking power, had staged a “coup against democracy”.
But despite the far-left's attempts to win a democratic mandate, the NFP fell far short of the number of seats needed for a majority in the National Assembly, and received millions of votes fewer than Le Pen's National Rally, which is currently the largest single party in Parliament.
Further undermining the NFP's attempts to brand itself as the defender of French democracy, the left-wing group has nominated Lucy Castets, a socialist deep state civil servant, as its candidate for prime minister, despite the fact that she has never been elected by the French people.
Although it is historic that the impeachment process has overcome its first hurdle, i doubt it The far-left will achieve their goal of ousting the president. In the coming weeks, the bill will be presented to the National Assembly's legal affairs committee and then possibly to the full Assembly.
First, Insubordinate France needs to present a resolution to the Senate and National Assembly to convene a “high court.” This measure only requires the support of one-tenth of the 577 members of the National Assembly, so Insubordinate France can pass it alone along party lines. However, this resolution needs a two-thirds majority in both houses to be approved. Impeaching the president requires an additional two-thirds majority.
Given that the Socialist Party (PS), a member of the New Popular Front, has refused to support the move, the New Popular Front can only muster 151 votes at best, far short of the 384 needed for impeachment. The far-left has also failed to win over the populist National Rally to its cause, and the current dwindling number of seats in parliament makes the measure likely to fail from the start.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally party, commented on the start of impeachment proceedings. said “The far-left, trying to make people forget its repeated compromises with President Macron, is defending impeachment proceedings against the president of the Republic that have no chance of success given the divisions within the left,” he said on Tuesday.
“This smokescreen will ensure that the French will not forget that the LFI helped Macron in 2017, then again in 2022, before negotiating an electoral pact to pull out in June 2024 to defend his seat. Enough of this sinister comedy. Macron and the LFI are linked to the breakdown, anarchy and chaos that has plunged the country into.”
