The first thing Lucie Castets intends to do as France’s next prime minister is to peel back the age of retirement to 62. To pay for at least some of that, she will introduce a tax on the country’s ultrarich. Ms. Castets, the candidate of choice of the left-wing coalition that won the most seats in France’s snap legislative elections that ended in July, has not been tapped for the job. “We are in a somewhat Kafkaesque, surreal situation, where a candidate for the post of prime minister is campaigning for a job that she cannot exercise,” Rémi Lefebvre, a professor of political science at the University of Lille, said. Almost seven weeks since those elections ended in deadlock, with neither left, right nor center winning a majority, France remains intractably stuck.

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Persons: Lucie Castets, Castets, Emmanuel Macron, ” Rémi Lefebvre, intractably Organizations: University of Lille Locations: France