Opposition parties on the far right and far left have called confidence votes, known as “censure” votes on Lecornu’s government, for Thursday morning and are demanding parliamentary elections.<\/p>\n
The Socialists said they would be prepared to support the new government, but only if it promises a complete suspension of Macron’s pension changes.<\/p>\n
“If he does not explicitly say the words ‘immediate and complete suspension of the pension reform’, it will be censure,” Socialist MP Laurent Baumel said earlier on French TV.<\/p>\n
“He is holding his destiny in his own hands. He knows what he has do if he doesn’t want to be the prime minister who resigns every week.”<\/p>\n
The reforms were finally pushed through parliament in March 2023, less than a year after Macron was voted in for a second presidential term.<\/p>\n
There had been months of political debate, strikes and street protests, and in the end the bill had to go through without a vote in parliament using a constitutional mechanism known as 49:3. <\/p>\n
Last week, Lecornu said it was something many French people remembered as a “wound on democracy” .<\/p>\n
On Tuesday he made it plain to MPs that suspending the pension reform would cost \u20ac400m (\u00a3350m) in 2026 and a further \u20ac1.8bn (\u00a31.57bn) in 2027. This will have to be “compensated by other savings,” Lecornu said.<\/p>\n
Lecornu is France’s third prime minister in the past year but even if he does survive he needs to get a budget through parliament that brings down a budget deficit heading for 5.4% of economic output (GDP) this year. <\/p>\n
France’s public debt earlier this year stood at \u20ac3.4tn, or almost 114% of GDP, the third highest in the eurozone after Greece and Italy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Opposition parties on the far right and far left have called confidence votes, known as “censure” votes on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[84,4176,4174,4175,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-199721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-finance","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199721","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=199721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}