France’s prime minister has quit after losing a confidence vote that toppled his government, plunging the country into a new political crisis.
François Bayrou submitted his resignation to President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, who accepted it. A day earlier, 364 out of 573 lawmakers had voted against Bayrou’s government – well above the 280 needed – after his attempt to force through an unpopular plan to tame France’s ballooning budget deficit.
Macron will appoint a successor “in the coming days,” according to the Élysée Palace, his fifth prime minister in less than two years.
Before he was ousted, Bayrou warned that getting rid of him would not resolve France’s challenges. “You have the power to bring down the government, but you do not have the power to erase reality,” he told lawmakers. “Reality will remain relentless: expenses will continue to rise, and the burden of debt, already unbearable, will grow heavier and more costly.”
Macron now faces the task of steering France out of its financial morass.
Why do French governments keep collapsing?
The chaos can be traced back to Macron’s dramatic decision to call a snap poll last year. Piqued by the remarkable successes of the far-right National Rally (RN) in the European elections in June 2024, the president rolled the dice on a parliamentary vote. The gamble backfired and his centrist bloc lost seats to the far right and far left, leaving France with a divided National Assembly and effectively ungovernable.
But it didn’t have to be this way. France’s Fifth Republic, founded by President Charles de Gaulle in 1958, was designed to end the chronic instability that had plagued the Third and Fourth Republics earlier in the 20th century. The new constitution gave broad powers to the executive and set up a majority system to avoid short-lived governments. As a result, for decades, two mainstream political parties on the left and right alternated in power.
Macron blew up that order in 2017, by becoming the first president elected without the backing of either of the main established parties. Re-elected in 2022, he soon lost his parliamentary majority as voters flocked to the extremes. Two years of fragile rule followed, with Macron repeatedly forced to invoke Article 49.3 of the constitution – pushing legislation through without a vote, to the increasing displeasure of opposition lawmakers and much of the French public.
In the 2024 snap election, the left won most seats in the second round of voting but still fell short of a majority after the far right dominated the first. But the left’s hopes of forming a minority government collapsed when Macron refused to accept their choice of prime minister. Unlike Germany or Italy, France has no tradition of coalition building, instead its politics have been shaped for more than 60 years by a presidency-dominated system.
What will Macron do next?
There’s a French saying that goes “Les mêmes causes produisent les mêmes effets” – the same causes produce the same consequences. And for Macron, history does indeed risk repeating itself unless he can find a prime minister able to broker compromise.
The problem is that, after three failed centrist prime ministers whose tenures ranged from between three to nine months, the opposition parties are in no mood to give another one a chance.
So Macron is caught in a political vise, with the far left calling for his resignation, the far right demanding a snap election and the mainstream left and right remain unable to reach consensus.
Who could take over next and will it matter?
The frontrunner to replace Bayrou appears to be outgoing Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu. But by choosing a premier from his own ranks Macron risks sounding tone-deaf, a sign that he has yet to fully accept the reality of his snap election defeat.
The logic behind Lecornu is that he might strike a deal with the Socialists to make the budget more palatable, the same compromise that Bayrou used to push through this year’s budget with concessions to the left. Yet that path now looks unworkable.
The Socialists want to tax the rich and roll back Macron’s tax cuts for businesses, demands that are anathema to the right. Bayrou as a centrist barely managed to walk that tightrope, Lecornu, positioned further to the right, may not be as agile.
One potential saving grace is that neither the left nor the right wants the snap election far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen is pushing for, since both political wings would risk losing seats. This gives them an incentive to cooperate, but not at any price.
What’s the mood in the country?
Away from politics, wider economic turmoil has rattled French investors. Yields on French government bonds – or the interest rate demanded by investors – have risen above those of Spanish, Portuguese and Greek bonds, which were once at the heart of the eurozone debt crisis. A possible downgrade of France’s sovereign debt rating review Friday would deliver another blow to the country’s economic standing in Europe.
Yet, following these turbulent years, the political climate is also bleak. In the event of another snap parliamentary election, a recent Elabe poll suggests that the far-right RN would emerge on top – as the largest single party in the National Assembly – with the left coming in second and Macron’s centrist bloc a distant third.
Many in France now assume the far right will eventually take power – if not now, then after the 2027 presidential election – though few believe such an outcome would solve the country’s problems.
Public trust in the political class has collapsed and anger is set to spill onto the streets. The far left has called nationwide protests for Wednesday against austerity, under the banner “Bloquons tout” (Let’s block everything), and vow to paralyze the country with roadblocks and civil disobedience.
The outgoing interior minister has warned of “intense disruptions.” Trade unions are planning another wave of mobilization on September 18 with strikes expected in hospitals and across rail services.
Dominique Moïsi, a senior analyst at the Paris-based think tank Institut Montaigne, says he cannot recall a moment of such profound deadlock in the Fifth Republic.
“De Gaulle survived assassination attempts, there was the Algerian war, in May ’68 the slogan was ‘La France s’ennuie,’ (France is bored). But today France is frustrated, furious, full of hatred towards the elite,” he told CNN.
“It sounds as if a regime change is inevitable, yet I can’t see how it will come about and who would do the job. We are in a phase of transition between a system that no longer works and a system no one can imagine.”