French President Emmanuel Macron has rejected calls from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally to hold fresh elections in the wake of the collapse of another government in Paris.
Prime Minister François Bayrou officially tendered his resignation to President Macron at the Élysée Palace on Tuesday, following a confidence vote in the National Assembly the previous evening in an apparent bid to gain legitimacy for an unpopular set of budget austerity measures aimed at confronting France’s soaring debt levels.
Bayrou has thus become the fourth-shortest tenured prime minister since the Fifth Republic was established in 1958. His successor will become the fifth prime minister appointed by Macron since his reelection in 2022, following the collapse of two governments over the past ten months.
Despite the apparently ungovernable divide within the National Assembly, resulting from Macron’s controversial election pact last year with the leftist New Popular Front to prevent Le Pen’s National Rally from taking power in parliament, the Élysée announced on Tuesday that the president will name a successor to Bayrou within “days”.
Macronist ally and another one of his former prime ministers, Gabriel Attal, suggested on Tuesday that the president appoint a negotiator to consult with party leaders to find a consensus candidate to pass a budget for next year. He suggested pulling someone from outside of the political sphere, such as from the trade unions, to mediate an agreement on a “few points” that a future PM would be tasked with delivering.
Responding to the proposal, Marine Le Pen said: “Macron’s camp is hitting rock bottom. Already unable to pull the country out of the chaos it has plunged it into for eight years, Gabriel Attal’s proposal to appoint a mediator would amount to designating a referee for a match when all the teams have left the field.
“The French have no use for yet another roundtable of losers on the theme: ‘how to fail better together.’ What they want is a return to the ballot boxes through dissolution.”
On the other hand, leftist parties have called for Macron to appoint a socialist or green politician to the Hôtel Matignon. However, this would be unlikely given opposition from the centrist Les Républicains (LR), including Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, who has said that his party would not support a socialist prime minister.
Thus, it is likely that Macron will once again attempt to install a PM from the centrist establishment camp. Le Figaro reports that some of the names floated in Paris as potential Républicains candidates for the role include Minister of Justice Gérald Darmanin, Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu, Labour Minister Catherine Vautrin, or LR leader of Upper France, Xavier Bertrand.
President of the French National Assembly Yaël Braun-Pivet, of Macron’s Renaissance faction, has also been named as a potential prime minister.
Regardless, any future government will likely continue to struggle to pass a national budget, like Bayrou’s government or the even shorter-lived Barnier government before it, given the three-way split in the National Assembly between the hard left, Macron’s centrist allies, and the Le Penist faction on the right.
National Rally President Jordan Bardella remarked on Tuesday: “If Mr Macron chooses to appoint a new Prime Minister, the latter will have no choice but to break with the policy pursued for the past 8 years. If he does not, the same causes will lead to the same consequences.”
Since Macron came into office, France’s debt has ballooned from €2.281 trillion to €3.345 trillion, or around 114 per cent of GDP, the highest of any EU nation outside of Italy and Greece. Meanwhile, Paris’ budget deficit increased this year to 5.8 per cent, well above the EU target limit of 3 per cent and the most of any country within the bloc.
Should France fail to turn its fiscal situation around, it faces potential economic sanctions from Brussels and a further downgrading of its international credit rating.
The political and economic turmoil may ramp up even further this week, as pre-planned labour union Bloquons tout (let’s block everything) strikes on Wednesday may threaten to boil over into nationwide protests and potential riots across the country.
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