Parties across the board in the National Assembly had fiercely criticised the composition of Lecornu’s cabinet, which was largely unchanged from Bayrou’s, and threatened to vote it down.<\/p>\n
Several parties are clamouring for early elections and some are calling for Macron to go – although he has always said he will not stand down before his term ends in 2027.<\/p>\n
“The only wise thing to do now is to hold elections,” said Marine Le Pen of the hard-right National Rally (RN).<\/p>\n
“The joke’s gone on long enough. French people are fed up. Macron has put the country in an extremely difficult position,” she added.<\/p>\n
The decision on how to proceed now rests with Macron, who must surely be asking himself how long this political charade can be allowed to go on.<\/p>\n
He has three options. He can appoint another prime minister. He can once again dissolve the National Assembly. Or he can resign himself.<\/p>\n
The last is the least likely, while the first would be his natural choice.<\/p>\n
However, who now could he name to form a government? Lecornu \u2013 the ultimate Macron loyalist \u2013 was seen as his last resort, but now he too has failed.<\/p>\n
He could appoint a Socialist, on the basis that the left deserves a go at government – but a Socialist administration would itself not take long to fall.<\/p>\n
So the logic must surely be for option two: for new legislative elections.<\/p>\n
The result would probably be a rout for the pro-Macron centre, and a big victory for the hard-right of Marine Le Pen. But when every other recourse fails, few avenues remain.<\/p>\n
Lecornu, a former armed forces minister, was France’s fifth prime minister in under two years. <\/p>\n
In his brief speech outside the H\u00f4tel de Matignon, the prime minister’s residence, which he only occupied for less than a month, Lecornu sharply criticised the “partisan appetites” of political factions, who he said “are all behaving as if they had an absolute majority”. <\/p>\n
“I was ready for compromise but all parties wanted the other party to adopt their programmes in their entirety,” he said. <\/p>\n
“It wouldn’t need much for this to work,” he added, saying, however, that parties needed to be more humble and “to cast some egos aside”.<\/p>\n
French politics has been highly unstable since July 2024, when Macron called for snap parliamentary elections in a bid to achieve a clear majority following a bruising loss for his party in the European Parliament vote.<\/p>\n
Instead the elections resulted in a hung parliament divided into ideologically opposed factions deeply at odds with one another and unwilling to work together. <\/p>\n
This has made it difficult for any prime minister to garner the necessary support to pass any bills.<\/p>\n
Michel Barnier was appointed prime minister last September but was ousted within three months. <\/p>\n
The government of his successor Fran\u00e7ois Bayrou’s too was voted down after nine months after parliament refused to back his austerity budget, which aimed to slash government spending by \u20ac44bn ($51bn; \u00a338bn). <\/p>\n
France’s deficit reached 5.8% of its GDP in 2024 and its national debt is 114% of its GDP. That is the third highest public debt in the eurozone after Greece and Italy, and equivalent to almost \u20ac50,000 per French citizen.<\/p>\n
Stocks fell sharply on the Paris exchange after the news of Lecornu’s resignation broke on Monday morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Parties across the board in the National Assembly had fiercely criticised the composition of Lecornu’s cabinet, which was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-181588","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}