The Wall Street Journal Opinion | France Gets a Centrist Prime Minister Opinion by The Editorial Board • 17h • 2 min read

 The Wall Street Journal

Opinion | France Gets a Centrist Prime Minister

Opinion by The Editorial Board • 17h • 2 min read

President Emmanuel Macron named centrist Michel Barnier as France’s new Prime Minister Thursday. It’s further evidence that Mr. Macron is more Bourbon than Bonaparte—he’s learned nothing and forgotten nothing from his recent political travails.

To recap, Mr. Macron called snap legislative elections in June to try to embarrass Marine Le Pen’s insurgent-right National Rally after she’d won big in European Parliament elections. Yet Ms. Le Pen was the winner in the first round of the legislative election. Mr. Macron then championed an anyone-but-Le Pen strategy that accidentally propelled a far-left alliance into pole position in the new National Assembly after the second round of voting.

So voters first tried to elect the insurgent right and then tried to elect the protest left, and in response Mr. Macron has . . . foisted another wooly centrist on them. Mr. Barnier is a veteran of the all but moribund center-right Republicans and a former European Union panjandrum recently in charge of representing Brussels in Brexit negotiations with Britain.

On the policy merits Mr. Barnier’s appointment is better than any of the leftist alternatives. The New Popular Front (NFP) coalition otherwise would have been positioned to pick a Prime Minister and the result could have been a Jeremy Corbyn on the Seine. The Front’s leading light is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose economic policies would make Bernie Sanders blush and whose foreign-policy ideas lean anti-American and antisemitic.

But that’s the political movement French voters picked after (and often because of) Mr. Macron’s ham-handed gamesmanship in the legislative elections. If Mr. Macron has a plan for governing France alongside Mr. Barnier atop a divided and ideologically hostile legislature, he’s not sharing it.

Perhaps the plan is to brazen it out. Mr. Barnier’s opponents likely lack the votes to oust him, at least for now, and some of his policy ideas on the environment may be able to cobble together support from centrist and leftist lawmakers. Still, chaos and deadlock seem assured for one of Europe’s largest countries at least until the next presidential election scheduled for 2027. The risk for France is that such gridlock will turn the voters toward even more radical populist directions.