Looking to limit damage, Macron names new prime minister a day after French government collapses

PARIS (CN) — French President Emmanuel Macron acted quickly Tuesday to name a new prime minister in an attempt to quell political chaos after a failed confidence vote toppled the government.

Macron named Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu to replace Prime Minister François Bayrou, who was forced to resign after Monday’s vote in Parliament.

Macron has told Lecornu “to consult the political forces represented in Parliament with a view to adopting a budget for the nation and making the agreements essential for the decisions of the coming months,” the Elysee said in a statement.

Lecornu is known as the ultimate Macron loyalist who does not harbor presidential ambitions.

Lecornu, a member of Macron’s Renaissance party, will inherit a budget deficit that reached 5.8% of GDP in 2024, or about $196 billion. The debt proved the coup de grâce for the former prime minister. Bayrou called for the vote himself after his unpopular budget cut proposals sparked mayhem across the political spectrum.

“You have the power to overthrow the government but you don’t have to power to erase the truth,” Bayrou said to parliamentarians in the National Assembly ahead of the vote. “Reality presses on relentlessly, expenses continue to pile on, and the weight of debt — already unbearable — will become heavier and even more costly.”

Of 573 members of Parliament, 194 voted for Bayrou versus 364 against, alongside a handful of abstentions. Right -and left-wing leaders applauded the outcome.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the extreme-right National Rally, known as RN, said Monday marked “the end of the agony of a phantom government,” adding that “change cannot wait any longer.”

It’s one of the rare sentiments that unites the extreme ends of the political spectrum.

Mathilde Panot, a member of the far-left France Unbowed party, told the National Assembly that “all those who will try to save Macron will fall with him.”

Bayrou handed in his resignation Tuesday, leaving France’s domestic governing body without a leader or cabinet. This scenario has become familiar since Macron abruptly dissolved the government and called for snap legislative elections in June 2024, after the RN swept up an unprecedented number of votes at the European elections.

He has cycled through six prime ministers, with Bayrou’s predecessor losing a confidence vote nine months ago after only 90 days in office.

All eyes are on Macron to clean up the political mess that he started, and restore some stability to the government. But his options are limited; after appointing a prime minister, Macron could call for new snap elections or resign, but these are routes he has said he wouldn’t take.

Bayrou was chosen partly for his centrist approach — a strategy that clearly didn’t work.

Gabriel Attal, the former prime minister from Macron’s centrist bloc, earlier said the president should opt for a “negotiator” personality from outside of the political sphere, like a union or association leader. This person’s primary objective would be to bring the parties toward compromise.

Macron has said new legislative elections aren’t in the cards despite calls from the left and right; polls suggest that while support for the center bloc is falling, it’s rising for the right in particular, so the RN would likely gain seats at the expense of the president.

“Obviously, there’s something important in all of this, too: the outlook for the National Rally, which is projected to lead in possible early legislative elections by all opinion polls, with around 31% of voting intentions, far ahead of Emmanuel Macron’s movement,” Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist, researcher and author specializing in far-right movements in Europe, told Courthouse News. “Far ahead of the left, which remains disunited, and far ahead of the Republicans.”

Early elections would likely produce a Parliament as fractured as the current one, Camus added.

Meanwhile, there have been widespread calls for Macron’s resignation. But the president has repeatedly said that he will finish out his term through 2027.

“France is at a political impasse,” Arnaud Mercier, a political scientist and professor in communication sciences at the Panthéon-Assas University Paris II, told Courthouse News. “In the best-case scenario, it would be the next presidential election, whenever it happens, that could perhaps allow us to break this impasse. … We start again and finally elect a new president who will ask the French people to give him a parliamentary majority.”

Ludovic Renard, a political scientist and professor at Sciences Po Bordeaux, wonders if the continuous deadlock should prompt wider debate over France’s political system as a whole.

“Fundamentally, it’s the political space that has been transformed,” he told Courthouse News. “What some say is that we should change the rules of the electoral game.”

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