Just as kids go back to school and start a new year in September, so France’s politicians usually lay out a programme of ideas for la rentrée.

The restarting of the parliamentary term after the summer break marks a new beginning and a new year, when governments traditionally unveil their programme of policy aims for the next 11 months.

On Wednesday Emmanuel Macron – freshly returned from the presidential holiday home on the Riviera – chaired a meeting of the Council of Ministers where he and his team looked at the months ahead.

Here are some of the biggest challenges facing the president;

Unity

After a bruising battle over pension reform that took up most of the first half of the year and saw the biggest protests in France since 1968, Macron reportedly told his ministers that he wanted some ‘consensus’ issues to kick off the new political year.

The problem with that is that there isn’t much that France agrees on right now, and that’s even more true for the parliament, where Macron’s party lost its overall majority in the summer of 2022.

Prime minister Elisabeth Borne has (again) been tasked with building coalitions with other parties, but Macron is also reportedly mulling on the idea of going directly to the people and holding referendums on key issues. 

Immigration bill

Emblematic of the problems of unity is the repeatedly-delayed immigration bill. The pet project of interior minister Gérald Darmanin (more on him below) the bill has been due before parliament several times, but has been pulled because it was judged too divisive.

The bill itself is relatively minor stuff – although it does include a proposal for a mandatory French language exam for certain types of carte de séjour residency permit – but the topic is tricky.

Macron is trying to fight the threat from Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National and in order to get the bill through parliament needs the support of another party, most likely the centre-right les Républicains. The problem is that their immigration policies are very hard right, meaning it will be hard to find enough common ground to pass the bill.

Meanwhile many members of the leftist Nupes group – the biggest group in parliament after Macron’s – are implacably opposed to the bill.

Budget

Debates in parliament will begin in the autumn on the 2024 Budget, which will have to strike a middle ground between balancing France’s books and cutting its deficit while offering consumers as much protection as possible from the rising cost of living.

The government has the option to use the constitutional tool known as Article 49.3 to push financial bills such as the budget through parliament if MPs cannot agree. However repeated use of 49.3 over the past year – especially for that controversial pension bill – rendered the tool somewhat politically toxic. Resorting to it again so soon will be a bad look for the government.

Riots

Macron is also under pressure to be seen to be doing something in response to the rioting that shook France in July – following the death of a teenager at the hands of police.

The problem is that the left want him to do something about the long-standing problems of police violence while the right want him to ‘crack down’ on law and order and immigration (even though 90 percent of the rioters were French).

Macron has so far made only vague suggestions about increasing parental responsibility or clamping down on tech companies who allow calls for violence/rioting on social media. 

Le Pen 

One thing that both Macron’s government and a substantial percentage of the French people agree on is the threat coming from the far-right.

Marine Le Pen came second to Macron in 2017 and again in 2022 – gaining 41 percent of the vote. Her Rassemblement National party is the second largest single party in the French parliament (although the Nupes coalition of leftist parties is larger so functions as the main opposition).

More and more people are predicting that she could win in 2027, giving France it’s first far-right leader since the days of the Vichy government during the Nazi occupation. 

But while Macron’s party agrees on the problem, they don’t agree on the solution. Macron and his prime minister Elisabeth Borne had a rare public disagreement on this issue just before the summer break.

Borne, the daughter of a holocaust survivor, commented during an interview that Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National party was the legacy of Philippe Pétain, who led France during the Vichy regime, cooperating with the Nazis and deporting Jewish people to concentration camps.

Macron said that the far-right cannot be defeated with moral arguments, telling his ministers that. “You won’t be able to make millions of French people who voted for the far-right believe that they are fascists”, adding that the strategies and catch phrases “hailing from the 1990s” no longer work.

These fractures are likely to increase as the pressure is ratcheted up.

READ ALSO ‘We cannot continue to label France’s far right as fascists, we must debate them’

Cost of living

French residents have been greatly protected from the cost of living crisis that engulfed much of Europe in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – via a series of government measures from grants to price controls.

Many of these have already stopped and the finance minister said earlier in the year that the government cannot afford to keep renewing them (especially after narrowly escaping having its credit rating downgraded in the spring).

The problem for the government is that many people are struggling with the rising cost of food and utilities, and they’re angry about it. 

The government has ruled out any increase in taxes on households, and says it aims to “continue to lower the tax burden”, especially for middle-income households. 

Political backstabbing

France’s next presidential election is not until 2027 but already the jostling has begun over candidates. Macron himself cannot stand again as France only allows two consecutive presidential terms, but his centrist party has no obvious successor.

Former prime minister Edouard Philippe – widely regarded at this early stage as the favourite – has already set up his own party, while Macron’s interior minister Gérald Darmanin used the summer break to give an interview to Le Figaro that was widely interpreted as announcing his presidential intentions.

Borne on Wednesday responded by saying that 2027 is “a long way away” and she was focused on the upcoming year, but it’s likely that the political posturing will only get worse. 

Elections

Macron’s had a mixed run with elections recently – in April 2023 he was re-elected, the first French president to be re-elected in almost 20 years. But a couple of months later in the parliamentary elections his centrist group lost its overall parliamentary majority and has been struggling against the legislative deadlock ever since.

The next set of elections are the European elections, held in June 2024. Those don’t directly affect his position or the make-up of his government, but they are often seen as a kind of ‘opinion poll’ on the government of the day. A thumping defeat for Macronist candidates would be embarrassing both at home and on the European stage.