Whether it was likening the job to climbing a Himalayan mountain or captaining a ship taking on water from a growing leak, François Bayrou did not play down the task facing the prime minister of France.
Bayrou and Michel Barnier, veteran politicians from the centre and the centre right respectively, both crashed out without getting their budget passed by parliament.
Barnier, the shortest serving prime minister in French history, was forced to resign after three months when he lost a confidence vote. Bayrou lasted nine months before his minority government was toppled by the same opposition parties this week.
Sébastien Lecornu, an ally of Emmanuel Macron who served in every one of the president’s governments — most recently as defence minister since 2022 — has been named as the new prime minister.
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Parliament remains deadlocked and he will have to cobble together his own minority government to have a go at pushing a budget through the divided National Assembly. This will be France’s third government in less than a year.
In a way, Lecornu is a typical politician of the Macron project, which saw the president reshape French politics by carving a path to power through the middle that didn’t really exist beforehand.
Macron formed a new centre “movement” that pulled in figures and politicians, plus popular support, from the traditional big party on the centre left, the Socialists and the Republicans on the right.
Lecornu was a member of the conservative Republicans before but joined Macron’s Renaissance camp in 2017, the year he first won the presidency. Since then he has been a stalwart of the president’s administrations.
Ironically that successful attempt to build a centre force that could win a presidential election is partly responsible for fuelling a shift of other voters to the political fringes. Dissatisfaction with Macron and his allies has benefited the more extreme parties in opposition.
Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally is currently the most popular party according to opinion polls. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical France Unbowed is the biggest force on the left.
It was Macron’s decision to spring a snap election last summer that backfired and left the country with the fractious National Assembly it has today. The result was a parliament divided between three factions where no one is within touching distance of a workable majority.
Fears of losing more ground to Le Pen and Mélenchon mean moderate figures on the left and the right are afraid of working too closely with Macron’s diminished centre group.
Olivier Faure, head of the centre-left Socialists, is wary of being portrayed as propping up a deeply unpopular establishment. So is Bruno Retailleau, leader of the Republicans, who supported Bayrou and Barnier.
[ ‘Many arrests may be made’: France braces for protests as government crumblesOpens in new window ]
Lecornu will try to strike some kind of detente that avoids the Socialists, the Greens and Le Pen’s deputies voting to reject whatever budget is drawn up by his new minority government. That will involve making a lot of concessions. He will be hoping to keep the Republicans on board as well.
Bayrou had tabled a controversial budget package that included about €44 billion in spending cuts and freezes.
The former prime minister said this belt tightening was necessary to pull back France’s large spending deficit and reduce its mounting public debts. Barnier made the same argument before him. Neither man was successful.
France, alongside Germany, is one of the big economic and ideological drivers of the European Union. So what happens in Paris is of concern to other capitals.
“We are observing it carefully because it has the potential, if something went wrong, for it to be very bad,” one Brussels-based EU official said.
The official, who works on economic policy, said there is no immediate cause for panic about France’s fiscal health. The situation is more akin to an amber light, than one that is flashing red.
Things might change if current political instability stretches on and on and the country fails to get a better handle on its spending deficit in the long term. “A slow implosion and a lack of strong political decision-making would be the worst case scenario,” the EU official said.
Lecornu may benefit from opposition parties on the left and the far right feeling they cannot topple a new government so soon after they sent the last one to the rocks. That could give him a window to get a compromise budget passed before the end of the year.
