It will be ‘part deux’ for Sébastien Lecornu as President Emmanuel Macron reappointed him as prime minister on Friday evening just days after he sensationally resigned and declared that his mission was “over” after less than a month in office.
In a desperate attempt to maintain control in Paris and avoid the dissolution of the National Assembly and subsequent parliamentary elections, President Macron held a series of frenzied talks at the Élysée Palace on Friday with various party heads, excepting Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left La France Insoumise (France in Rebellion/LFI) and Marine Le Pen’s populist Rassemblement National (National Rally/RN).
Reports emerged that President Macron had come to an agreement with the left-wing Socialist Party to not censure a second Lecornu government in exchange for a compromise on the controversial raise of the pension reforms of 2023, which sparked months of riots after a previous Macron government used a constitutional loophole to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 without a vote in the National Assembly.
However, Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure, after meeting Macron in the Élysée, said that the president “provided no clear answers” and that if there is not a full suspension of the pension reforms, his party will censor the government “immediately”, Le Parisien reported.
Yet any such agreement with the left on pensions may risk Macron’s neo-liberal base, many of whom see it as one of their chief accomplishments and who express concern about adding further billions to France’s ballooning debt. Indeed, the Horizon party of former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, which makes up one of the three parties in Macron’s Ensemble coalition, is reported to have said that it will have no “compromise on pension reform.”
Meanwhile, former Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, the leader of the centre-right Les Républicains who took down the first Lecornu government on Monday due to objections over the amount of Macron loyalists in the proposed cabinet, has also said that he would not support another Macronist prime minister or any rollback of the pension reforms.
It appears that Macron may be betting on the Républicains defecting from Retailleau’s position, and that the establishment party is less likely to vote to censure the government than the Socialist Party and thus caving to leftist demands may be the only path forward to keep the government running and pass a budget.
This will likely come to a head in the coming days, with a deadline looming for the government to present a proposed budget. Should either the Socialists or Républicains decide to join the censure movement, the government would likely collapse.
Despite declaring on Wednesday that his mission was “over”, Prime Minister Lecornu said on Friday evening: “I accept – out of duty – the mission entrusted to me by the President of the Republic to do everything possible to provide France with a budget by the end of the year and to address the daily life issues of our fellow citizens.”
While Lecornu said that all issues raised during the past week of talks “will be open to parliamentary debate”, he noted that given France’s looming debt crisis — and the impending financial penalties should Paris fail to get its books in order — “restoring our public finances remains a priority for our future and our sovereignty: no one will be able to evade this necessity.”
It remains to be seen if the self-described “soldier monk” will be able to thread the needle of the budget fight that destroyed the governments of his two predecessors in the Hôtel Matignon over the past year.
The continued political chaos in Paris will likely redound to the benefit of presidential frontrunner Marine Le Pen and her populist National Rally party, which continues to demand that President Macron dissolve the parliament and call for fresh legislative elections to allow the public to break the logjam in the deeply divided National Assembly.
“The manoeuvres continue, censorship is therefore necessary, and dissolution is more indispensable than ever,” Le Pen remarked, while warning: “All the political parties that participated in giving Emmanuel Macron the time necessary to implement this shameful manipulation will be held accountable at the next elections.”
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