France’s prime minister François Bayrou looks set to be ousted in a parliamentary confidence vote on Monday, in what would mark the collapse of the country’s fourth government in just three years.
Bayrou, who stepped into the role on 25 August amid fraught negotiations over the budget, has spent the past two weeks trying to stitch together a parliamentary majority.
But opposition leaders across the spectrum, from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) to Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, have already declared their intention to vote him out. “The government will fall,” Mélenchon said over the weekend.
The likely defeat threatens to deepen France’s political paralysis at a time when Europe is grappling with war in Ukraine, rising tensions with the United States and China, and sluggish growth.
It also adds pressure to Paris’s strained public finances, with debt standing at 113.9% of GDP and last year’s deficit nearly double the EU’s 3% ceiling. Investors have begun to demand higher risk premiums for French bonds, raising the spectre of further credit downgrades.
President Emmanuel Macron, who has so far ruled out dissolving parliament again after doing so in 2024, will face the challenge of finding a new prime minister capable of steering a budget through a hung legislature. After the failure of conservative Michel Barnier and now centrist Bayrou, attention has shifted to the Socialists as possible candidates for compromise.
Yet even a centre-left nominee would face an uphill task in forging alliances with Macron’s liberal bloc and a fractured opposition. Marine Tondelier of the Greens said Macron “cannot go against the polls a third time,” while conservatives remain divided over whether to support or resist a Socialist premier.
As Mohamed, an 80-year-old fruit seller at Paris’s Aligre market, put it: “There won’t be a majority, there will be no budget.”
