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Your humble blogger is no expert in French politics. I trust those who are will pipe up.
But from this far remove, it looks as if President Macron’s days are numbered. Even though his term in office lasts until May 2027, the record-speed collapse of the government of Macron’s latest Prime Minister pick Sébastien Lecornu had formed a government suggests that even with the office of the French President being extremely well bunkered against challenges from the Parliament, that Macron’s position has become so untenable that he can’t hold out for much longer.
First some hot takes. From LeMonde:
President Emmanuel Macron’s office announced that Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu had tendered his resignation on the morning of Monday, October 6, hours after his new government had been formed. Lecornu’s resignation after 27 days in office, making him the shortest-lived prime minister in modern French history, plunges the country into political uncertainty again….
On Sunday evening, Lecornu had unveiled his cabinet, which was almost identical to that of his fallen predecessor, François Bayrou. But cracks were apparent right away, with members of several parties within the governing coalition expressing doubts and criticism about the lack of change….
It was not immediately clear how Macron would proceed. Up to now, he has resisted calls to again order new snap legislative polls and has also ruled out resigning himself before his mandate ends in 2027…
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party, called to introduce a motion to remove Macron from office. Mathilde Panot, a prominent member of LFI, called for Macron’s resignation following Lecornu’s resignation. “The countdown has begun. Macron must go,” she said, in a post on X.
The Paris stock market had slipped by more than 2% by 10 am, half an hour after the news broke.
The euro has also weakened against the dollar, and that looks to have been triggered by the shock resignation:
France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has resigned less than a month after his appointment, prompting a market sell-off amid concern about dysfunction in the Eurozone’s second-biggest economy…
His resignation came after his allies in the centre-right Les Républicains indicated they could withdraw from his government because of the number of ministers he planned to include from Macron’s Renaissance party.
The leftwing Socialist party also threatened to vote it down unless Lecornu suspended Macron’s emblematic pension reforms.
Lecornu was the third prime minister appointed by Macron since snap parliamentary elections in summer 2024, a vote that left the French assembly bitterly divided and has made governing almost impossible. All three have now left office….
Macron will have the difficult challenge of either naming another prime minister who is likely to encounter the same difficulties as Lecornu and his predecessors, or calling new parliamentary elections…
“The only way to stop this crisis is to have a new election,” said Emmanuel Cau, head of European equities strategy at Barclays. “It’s making Europe hard to invest in and creating an excuse for investors to tread carefully.”
He added: “The market has to think about the far right being in a position to capitalise.”
The additional interest rate paid on French debt over benchmark German Bunds — a closely watched measure of market worries — went as high as 0.88 percentage points, close to its highest level since the Eurozone debt crisis more than a decade ago.
The failure of yet another Macron government is a sign of the dwindling options the president faces as he tries to rein in France’s ballooning budget deficit while corralling a fractious National Assembly.
France’s borrowing costs have risen to the levels of Europe’s debt-laden periphery as Macron has cast about for a prime minister who can pass a new budget by the end of the year. France’s CAC 40 stock index fell 2% on Monday while the yield on France’s 10-year bonds rose to 3.6%, above Italy’s.
Macron faced immediate demands to dissolve the National Assembly and call parliamentary elections from opponents who say the lower house is too fractured to produce a stable government.
“There can be no return to stability without a return to the polls and the dissolution of the National Assembly,” said Jordan Bardella, the president of the far-right National Rally, on Monday.
Fresh elections risk further diminishing Macron’s ranks in the National Assembly. His decision to dissolve parliament in the summer of 2024 paved the way for the current fragmentation, with parties on the left and far right gaining seats while Macron’s centrist and conservative allies suffered losses….
Lecornu took office promising a break with Macron’s previous prime ministers. But he was quickly engulfed in the storm that doomed his predecessors, with lawmakers on the left demanding tax increases on the wealthy to close the budget gap and lawmakers on the right blaming France’s sizable welfare state for the fiscal mess. Neither side showed signs of budging, let alone supporting Lecornu’s efforts to form a cabinet from different parties that might help build consensus across the National Assembly.
Instead, Lecornu appointed figures drawn from previous Macron governments. He named former Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire as defense minister, enraging conservatives who blamed him for the state of France’s public finances.
Lawmakers on the left, meanwhile, took aim at Lecornu for sticking with Macron loyalists, undermining his promise for a break with the past.
Throughout the crisis, Macron has refused to appoint a prime minister from a coalition of leftist parties that won the most votes in 2024’s snap election. Since then, the coalition—which ranges from the far-left France Unbowed to socialists and greens—has become consumed with infighting. That makes it hard for Macron to name someone on the left who could muster a majority in parliament.
The question implied in the Journal extract, and often discussed more bluntly elsewhere, is whether France has become “ungovernable”. As far as the current impasse is concerned, the very high level summary is that France has been running large fiscal deficits for many year to support its social safety nets, which French citizens object viscerally to having trimmed much. France does not issue its own currency, so its ability to carry on this way (independent of getting away with violating EU budget rules) has consequences more quickly than for a currency issuer like the US or UK, in the form of having to pay a lot more in interest to be able to borrow. But France is unwilling or unable to tax meaningfully more (it is over my pay grade as to whether there are other ways to tax the well-off more besides the wealth tax idea that Macron is rejecting). And another layer of problems results from the neoliberal allergy to industrial policy to help spur growth (France does have a history of dirigisme, so it may be a bit less reluctant, but Macron himself is a neoliberal diehard, plus even with a sound plan, it would take years for a restructuring to bear real fruit).
Again, from my considerable remove, is that one solution for the budget impasse would be to do the utterly unthinkable and reject the self-serving US calls for much bigger NATO commitments, to be used significantly to bleed Europe through higher purchases of US weapons (even charitably assuming we can make all that many). But weak leaders, from Macron to Starmer and Merz, have been trying to whip up hysteria about Russia to a fever pitch so as to shore up their faltering positions. Their fear-mongering has been duly amplified by Ursula von der Leyen and one imagines many members of the European parliament. So there are real fissures, even though it’s easy to caricature them as elites v. ordinary citizens. Keep in mind that the Creel Commission first demonstrated that sustained propaganda campaigns do produce large shifts in public sentiment in remarkably short periods of time.
Additional tidbits from Twitter:
Lecornu arrive même à battre un record centenaire de la Troisième république, faut applaudir pic.twitter.com/LEG9myBby2
— Julien (@Teidix) October 6, 2025
🚨🇫🇷 FLASH
Sébastien Lecornu détient un DOUBLE RECORD : le Premier ministre le PLUS LENT à FORMER son GOUVERNEMENT (26 jours), et le PLUS RAPIDE à DÉMISSIONNER (27 jours). https://t.co/RqdOfk3Nvm pic.twitter.com/nz2MnYTFIy
— Impact (@ImpactMediaFR) October 6, 2025
Note that this continued revolt against Macron’s neoliberal, pro-war budget policies comes on the heels of a different process of government formation, with former Czech prime minister Andrej Babis set to return to power.
From Bloomberg:
- Billionaire Andrej Babis is set to form a new Czech government after scoring his best-ever election victory, with plans to govern with the support of a far-right group and a populist party.
- Babis’s return to power is poised to bolster the ranks of populist leaders in the European Union, with his campaign putting Brussels on notice that he will challenge policies from migration to military aid to Ukraine.
- Babis has made clear that he is against any form of “Czexit” and remains an adherent of NATO, but his policy agenda is expected to lie with his allies, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Slovakia’s Robert Fico.
Note a Bloomberg piece sees the whackage to the euro to be limited:
Still, once the knee-jerk reaction fades, France’s political risks may have limited power to drag the currency lower. Markets have shown little sensitivity to such headlines in recent weeks, and today’s move likely reflects traders jumping on the first tradeable story in days, with the US shutdown keeping dollar visibility low. Options pricing, meanwhile, continues to show a constructive bias on the euro’s short-term outlook.
To keep the discussion focuses on “whither France?” we do need to dismiss one issue, that of a Eurozone breakup. The UK demonstrated that countries that kept their own currencies can exit the EU, albeit with real and not trivial economic costs. Eurozone members like France are in a completely different place. We can unpack this again (we treated it repeatedly and at length during the Greek bailout crisis of 2015), but the short version is trying to leave the Eurozone would produce an immediate banking system collapse. There is no way to do it quickly. As soon as word goes out, those with deposits in French banks would immediately move them to other banks in the eurozone, or even completely outside the EU, to escape having their deposits force-redenominated into a new franc that would be sure to be worth less outside France than euros. In addition, the French government’s ability to force-redenominate borrowings in euros on its own behalf and on behalf of private parties into new francs would also likely be limited. Any exposed borrowers would see the real value of their debts rise, since they would have to continue paying in euros even though their assets, and presumably a lot of their income, would be in lower-value new francs.
Mind you, the above does not mean that non-Eurozone members might not at some point gear up to leave the EU. But NATO, which legally is a loose alliance and heavily dependent on the US, IMHO is more at risk.
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I can’t resist. Shall we see if Macron lasts longer than a head of lettuce?
LOL … See? Yet another vestige of why #NC is special!
NO GOLDFISH BRAINS HERE!
♥️
It seems to me that the one common denominator that makes France “ungovernable” is Macron. Watching Macro limp away in the rear view mirror seems to be the place to start. For the EU at large, the nadir of political competence and leadership that we have reached is the at the bottom of every other problem facing the continent. Cleaning out the current political elite would be the way to go. Then again, is there any political competence to be found anywhere in Europe at all? If so, it’s well hidden.
mgr: For the EU at large, the nadir of political competence and leadership that we have reached is the at the bottom of every other problem facing the continent.
I don’t think so. The root of this systemic issue is neoliberalism, selecting against any political competence that might change the direction of neoliberal travel and, thus, for the likes of Macron, Merz, and Starmer.
Neoliberalism: a term as undefined and abused as ‘democracy’.
How neoliberalism abuses ‘democracy’: decriminalization, deregulation, privatization.
YingYang: Neoliberalism: a term as undefined and abused as ‘democracy’.
Hardly. But I’m here to help. You can start educating yourself here: —
The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich von Hayek, 1945
https://www.kysq.org/docs/Hayek_45.pdf
Hayek: “The marvel is that in a case … of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; that is, they move in the right direction.”
This is, in short, a platonic ideal of the Market as a perfect computer with perfect information allocating resources perfectly, in a way mere human governments could never do. Hayek was swiping from early cybernetics thinking about neural nets by Norbert Weiner and Pitt & McCulloch, to construct a theoretical justification for an ideology of why’ markets’ — capital — must be insulated from the demands of democracy and governments and ‘the masses.’
From this, the Hayek’s followers in the Mont Pelerin society then formulated government and politicians’ roles as being to facilitate the operations of markets — i.e. of capitalists — as capitalists dictated, and to ring-fence those operations from interference by the masses.
See in the Mont Pelerin’s Statement of Aims —
https://montpelerin.org/statement-of-aims/
Forex-
‘…re-establishing the rule of law and of assuring its development in such manner that individuals and groups are not in a position to encroach upon the freedom of others and private rights are not allowed to become a basis of predatory power.
‘The possibility of establishing minimum standards by means not inimical to initiative and functioning of the market.‘
Critically, note that in reality neoliberalism does not work as in the cartoon version that Milton Friedman that sold where government is removed. Rather, neoliberalism very much holds that governments have a role — and this is to facilitate and privilege capital and the operations of capitalists above the demos and all else. In other words, politicians’ role is not to govern, but to serve capitalists
And that’s exactly what you see in politicians like Macron, Merz, and Starmer.
Hope this helps.
It is useful to remember that von Hayek and von Mises were scarred by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire and carried with them for the rest of their days a confirmed horror and loathing of democracy.
They remained unreconstructed aristocrats with all of the prejudices one would expect.
They claimed the authority of Reason, and you say they had “the prejudices one would expect.”
Reason stands against Prejudice – Hayek and von Mises insist on this – so as prejudiced, they are against reason.
QED
Macron will be “rewarded” with something – perhaps a seat on the EU Commission, perhaps an appointment as an EU minister … something.
How much longer can the EU survive with its’ policy of allowing technocrats to fail upwards?
I suspect it is not that much longer.
I don’t understand the stubbornness of Macron; he has made his own bed here. How hard would it have been to throw the left a bone and walk back some of the pension reform? Or raise taxes on the wealthy. Or just put a few leftist figures in the cabinet.
It seems that neoliberal elites would rather burn the place to the ground than accept any pushback to neoliberal austerity measures.
The myth of TINA must be preserved.
oh yes. scorched earth is the only option these neolib elites have. the alternative is to be hung off a steel girder, a la musssolini.
Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mussolini_e_Petacci_a_Piazzale_Loreto,_1945.jpg
the only question is will it be through a popular revolution or security forces’ coup d’etat.
I don’t think the Nupes left alliance would last much longer than the Cornu government – it would probably be immediately brought down by all the right and center parties. I don’t know what the current polls look like, but my take is that another snap legislative election would favor the RN, since their voters are much more motivated to get to the polls. Macron might roll the dice on this and I actually think he’d be more comfortable with that cohabitation than knowing that Mélenchon was calling the shots for a leftist PM.
The talk for weeks has been about the “Taxe Zucman” wealth tax, which is opposed by the usual suspects and frankly not all that well thought out by its proponents. Without some kind of exit tax, the wealthy can just move some pieces around on the chessboard.
You’re obviously right about the peril of trying to escape the Euro and having been there at the start and working often in the Brussels institutions at the time as a naive young lobbyist, the elements of the process to make it irreversible were well thought out and intensely supported by all involved. There were people who thought that some sort of common fiscal area was a prerequisite but they were ignored. A lot of magic thinking about how things would just somehow work themselves out in the wash. I think the only way out would be for both France and Germany to announce that they’re both leaving at the same time and have the cards fall where they may (France would reap the wildwind), or for an agreement to undo it piecemeal by all the members. It won’t likely happen in my life but we’ve seen stranger things.
Or maybe it all just blows up. The euro architects may have been thinking they are creating immovable object, but they too seeded irresistible force, and it’s gaining in strength ever since.
I can’t comment on French politics, but just to your final points – Eurozone membership is not restricted to EU members – a country deciding to leave the EU would lose its seats on the ECB and other Eurozone commissions, but can retain the currency, although can only mint notes/coins with permission. Various microstates (Vatican City, Andorra, Monaco) use the Euro with consent, and Kosovo and Montenegro have adopted the euro without any formal agreement.
There are no written legal provisions within the treaties for any country to be expelled from the Eurozone, even if they leave the EU. Some legal experts have argued that there could be technical grounds to do so, but nobody is quite sure how European or national courts would interpret existing rules.
Arguably, I should have unpacked the point more. But I didn’t want to get into this topic since I regard it as a diversion in the context to France’s immediate political/fiscal mess. The short comments were intended as a quick dismissal of the idea of France leaving the eurozone.
I have difficulty seeing how leaving the EU while retaining the euro would confer benefits, since it would mean a hard border as with the UK (ex the EU being nice and negotiating favorable arrangements) and presumably leaving the Schengen zone, which logically should impair tourism from inside Europe. Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t see France as a civil law country of having the ECJ as its top authority. By contrast, the UK did have frictions with its common law system sitting under the ECJ, plus it also had the not-trivial issue of national ego.
Most assume, as they did with Greece, that leaving the eurozone would improve the economic/budgetary outlook for me departing country because 1. They would free themselves of EU budget/deficit rules; 2. They would get an economic boost by having their new currency depreciate, which would increase trade and tourism; 3 They could force denominate their debts in the new currency, which would prevent them from facing higher debt service costs as a result of the change.
Your detail is helpful and informative if/when I get to a fuller treatment of the topic,
I appreciate its off topic and historical precedents may not be applicable in todays economy, but the usual historical pattern for countries breaking away from a union of one form or another has been to maintain the existing currency with or without agreement, while introducing a new currency fixed to the older one (for example, the Irish pound, the Algerian franc, Maltese lira). Its often taken years or (in the Irish case, decades) for the transition to a new, floating currency.
That said, I really don’t see anything outside of a catastrophe that would lead to France leaving the EU. Fringe politicians may love suggesting it as a solution to one problem or other, but the historical pattern has always been for those parties, whether of the left or right, to change their view once they get into sight of power and realise the implications.
One of the things that is putting pressure on the French budget is Trump’s demand that countries like France buy US military equipment. So how about this. France says that they will maintain those contracts but on a COD basis. France will pay the US when those weapons hit French docks and have been tested out. As some weapons will take years to build and France may not be at the top of those lists, it might be years if not decades before France has to fork over the cash for those weapons. It would certainly give some relief for the French budget. And if they tell Zelensky to go take a hike financially, then they are probably halfway home with that budget.
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20250919-from-weapons-to-military-training-the-true-scale-of-french-aid-to-ukraine-russia-war
…and then it gets worse.
“As far as the current impasse is concerned, the very high level summary is that France has been running large fiscal deficits for many year to support its social safety nets, which French citizens object viscerally to having trimmed much.”
That might be how this is explained by the MSM, pundits, and politicians, but this is not what the French OFCE (i.e. “Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques” concluded in its analysis of the financial situation of the French state, as reported by newspaper Le Monde:
The degradation of the French public finances “is not attributable to a marked increase of public outlays (…), but rather to a significant reduction of government revenue.”
That is the result of decade after decade of tax rebates granted to the well-to-do, for-profit corporations, and financial operators, plus the not brilliant economic situation limiting incomes, and hence tax revenue.
Just 3 months ago, both the OFCE and the French “Cour des Comptes” (the constitutionally independent organ in charge of auditing the accounts of the state and its subdivisions) had determined that €105bn were needed to reduce France’s deficit to the 3% maximum authorized by EU rules. The previous Bayrou and Lecornu governments planned a €44bn package (thus, insufficient), consisting mainly of tinkering a few tax niches and widespread cuts in social benefits.
This is a straw man. I did not say the social safety nets were improved. Indeed, they have been cut.
And the deficits are VERY long-standing, contrary to what you say, and pre-date the Eurozone:
I can get only the last 11 years in a chart as a non-subscriber:
https://tradingeconomics.com/france/government-budget
France has run a deficit every year since the early 1970s, per Wikipedia. But it did not have its debt downgraded from AAA until 2012.
The issue now is not the 3% target but that France’s debt was downgraded again and it is now paying a premium to borrow.
Thank you and well said.
I was in France for much of August and September and noted how often the state and oligarch owned tv channels kept going on about benefits, but not the giveaways to the wealthy, including the temporary measures from covid allowed to continue.
LCI devoted a week’s worth of evening specials on this artificial crisis, featuring the Persian try hard from Switzerland, Darius Rochebin, and Francois Lenglet, who can now air his right wing nonsense more than on state owned France 2.
Italy, Spain and Portugal were often cited as examples of benefit and tax cuts and even pay cuts leading to increases in economic growth and influxes of the wealthy.
Xavier Niel’s boast to Le Monde, in mid-August, that France was the best place to be a billionaire and that he paid no more than 15% tax was never mentioned. Niel is son in law of LVMH’s Bernard Arnault. A few weeks after, Arnault was interviewed by the UK’s Sunday Times in his Brussels hideaway and called Gabriel Zucman a left wing extremist for his wealth tax proposals.
Indeed, Macron’s hatred of the left that disabused him of the idea that he could infect it with his ideas while he was a high-ranking member has left him wallowing in the mud with more and more radical rightists. (To call them Conservative is an insult to conservative ideas.)
To typify the problem as being due to the infighting of The Left is to ignore that the Left suggested several qualified candidates before Macron shot them down with complete disregard to precedence. They won the most seats, they should have the Prime Minister slot. Lucie Castets was a good choice from the more center of the new left alliance, but Macron used the BS excuse of ‘must wait for the coming Olympics to end’ before deciding, and then came up with a no without a real reason. Not only a Science Po grad, but degrees from London School of Econ as well as someplace in China…
Any article that doesn’t point out that France already has a wealth tax is twisting fact purposefully. The question is how much is appropriate. France has nearly 150 billionaires and nearly 3 million millionaires. The current wealth tax ranges from 0 – 1.5% beginning at 1.3 million euros…of wealth. That France has this and has the 3rd largest population of those in this economic range belies the idea that wealth taxes will cause them all to leave for the less taxed Slovakia or the Czech Republic.
Also, seeing Czech Republic reminds me that inserting the ‘populist’ governments of these countries needs to also point out that they are engines for cheap manufacturing, and rely upon being able to export 70-80% of their GDP to countries like France. Even Italy – I remember that my Fiat was born in either Czech or Slovak …anyway, point being, it is a tough rail for France to ride, keeping their car business flowing to a population with enough money to spend on their vehicles while keeping the increasing social safety net strong.
Some think that Macron is playing double-phuque-up chess, perhaps trying to give the ultra-rightists rope to look stupid and hang themselves by next giving them a chance to govern for some time before the next presidential election.
Huh? France ended its wealth tax on all assets in 2018. Please don’t accuse us of engaging in misinformation when it is you that is peddling it:
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/wealth-taxes-europe/
We have written repeatedly about wealth taxes. They don’t work very well. A lot of wealth is held in the form of interests in private companies, which are extremely hard to value. As someone who has regularly been engaged to do that, you can easily create a value swing of 5x depending on which entirely defensible assumptions you use in your financial forecasts.
It also costs a lot of money to do a proper valuation of a company of not trivial size, easily over $30,000. You need to create a full set of financial forecasts.
And a wealth tax (assessed annually) is very inefficient. Better to tax estates at much higher rates.
However, less frequent and bigger dings does not solve the basic problem. The IRS has lost every contested large estate valuation case over these issues since 1991.
Since the French goverment already spends 57% of French GDP and the tax to GDP ratio stands at 44% it’s not obvious how much room exists to increase taxes and spending. Surely there must be a point at which working, saving and investing become too unrewarding to continue. The parable of the foolish man who trained his horse to eat less until the poor beast died comes to mind.
“The parable of the foolish man who trained his horse to eat less until the poor beast died comes to mind.”
This doesn’t appear to have dissuaded European governments, besotted as they are by neoliberal ideas, from turning to austerity for their working people over and over and over again … 🤨
The super-rich are long overdue for a dose of their own medicine.
There’s a lot to say, but I’ll restrict myself to what we know so far.
Lecornu actually managed to form a government yesterday, after a lot of very detailed negotiations. It was another government of the centre and centre-right, which is the only type that is arithmetically feasible, given the composition of the National Assembly. However, at the last minute, the Republicans (the remains of the traditional centre-right party) pulled out, allegedly claiming that they hadn’t been given enough seats and that their opponents had too many. At that point it became impossible. We are thus in the strange position of having a government that has resigned, and a government that has been formed but never took office (this was due tomorrow) so nobody is actually sure who is responsible for what.
Lecornu spoke this morning, after presenting his resignation. I thought he spoke well: he was clearly depressed and even angry at the failure of the parties to agree to a government. He noted that he had promised not to invoke the famous Article 49,3 of the Constitution which allows a government to convert any motion into a vote of confidence. The opposition has been demanding this for years, but didn’t offer anything in return. He also said there were far too many “red lines” everywhere, that every party seemed to want the whole of its own programme or nothing, and that promises made in private had been disavowed later. He sounded very fed-up: this is traditional French politics at its very worst.
What happens now? There are three main possibilities.
(1) From the fact that Lecornu and Macron spoke for an hour this morning, it seems likely that Macron tried to persuade Lecornu to stay. This may mean he has no Plan B, and it’s not obvious who else he could ask to form a government. He could ask a figure on the Left, almost certainly from the Socialists, but they only have about 70 seats of the 289 needed for a majority. They could be joined by the Greens, Communists and some Independents, but that would be lucky to give them much more than 100-120 seats. (Nobody would agree to be in a coalition with Mélenchon’s LFI). So the majority of the support (and many of the Ministers) would have to come from the Centre and even the Right. I don’t think such a coalition is feasible. At the most they might manage 200 seats in a stable coalition, and could quickly be overthrown by a coalition led by LFI and the RN (which won more votes than any other party in 2024 but is excluded from government.)
(2) A dissolution of the National Assembly. This would occupy the pundits for a few weeks, but would not change anything substantial. The most likely result would be a drift to the Right. Le Pen’s party would do even better, LFI would continue to bleed votes to the Socialists, Macron’s alliance would fall to pieces because many of his MPs have already said that they won’t stand again, and it’s not clear there will be a rush to replace them. Some of Macron’s support will go to the moderate Right, some to the Socialists and Greens and quite a few just won’t vote. Forming a government will be at least as hard as it is now.
(3) Macron resigns. Whilst you can never say “no” definitively in politics, it’s hard to see it happening. He’s deeply unpopular, he has nothing to look forward to, and his dreams of being some kind of President of Europe are in pieces. The word is that he lives in a world of his own surrounded by servile courtiers like Louis XVI.
What are the proposed solutions? There are two.
(1) A “Sixth Republic,” which would amount to a return to parliamentary rule. My response to that is that you effectively have the Sixth Republic now, and any putative system would probably be even more blocked than the current one.
(2) Proportional Representation. This would give the RN perhaps 40% of the seats and make constructing a reliable majority impossible. It would also put a great deal of power in the hands of all parties representing special interests. The sole advantage claimed is that it couldn’t be any worse than the present system. Maybe.
More later as things develop.
Very much appreciated!!!
Then, why this inability to make any kind of agreement? Everyone pushing to her/his side and no one with capacity to join a small majority? Possibly no one has something that can be seen as a political plan or able to do “something” with enough political support.
This is possibly the political reflection of what goes on in general in the society. Everyone pushing their own interest and nothing can be agreed or moved forward because it is impossible to keep everyone happy enough.
Why would the opposition offer anything in return? That repugnant feature of the French Constitution is undemocratic, and the equivalent of making the legislature irrelevant (although I understand they can call for a vote of no-confidence or something akin to that if the PM resorts to such heavy-handed and dictatorial tactics.)
Imagine what Trump would do with this sort of power … doing an end run around Congress whenever he pleases. If I promise to stop abusing my wife, she owes me no consideration in return.
We know that you detest LFI but your statement that “Nobody would agree to be in a coalition with Mélenchon’s LFI” is false. The Nupes is a coalition of the left that includes LFI and it proposed Lucie Castets as a potential PM. The LFI hierarchy agreed on her nomination. That doesn’t mean that they’d be able to hold together that coalition for long in the face of centrist attempts to pull them apart (and not having the numbers) but the idea that LFI is somehow radioactive to the rest of the ancien régime left is most certainly not true. Nobody I know in the CGT is voting Communist, PS or Green, so that shows where the left is today. Perhaps watching the debate between Sophie Binet and Macron would enlighten some seemingly closed minds.
Maybe they should try sortition for the Sixth Republic.
I’m reminded of the late Michel Crozier’s 1977 formulation of La Société Blocquée” and of how French institutions inflexibly perpetuate the power relations between careerists.
“We must hate Le Pen and RN because they are racist but we must ban the hijab and Je suis Charlie!”
“We must hate Mélanchon and LFI because they are all communists and want to confiscate our property and send us to the guillotine!”
It should come as no surprise that Macron stands for nothing but Macron. What an odd little country. La France, c’est moi!
As at the end of the day here, there is one more significant development. Lecornu saw Macron this afternoon, and after a meeting that lasted an hour, he was persuaded to have one more go. In the impenetrable argot of French political speak, Lecornu agreed to “carry out final negotiations” between now and Wednesday evening to try to find “a platform of action and stability.” Lecornu will report to Macron on Wednesday evening, who will then “draw the appropriate conclusions” and will assume “his responsibilities.” (This stuff is almost impossible to translate properly, but you get the idea.)
What I think this means is that Macron is trying to force the creation of a new government by implicitly threatening a dissolution and elections that nobody except the RN actually wants. The biggest victims, ironically, would be his own party, not that he cares about that. He hopes that fear of political defeat will accomplish what patient dialogue cannot. He could be right, we’ll see.
Meanwhile, the Socialists, the Greens and the Communists (but not LFI) have said that they could be “available” for the job of Prime Minister, although where they would get a majority from, nobody knows. Whether they would participate in a government without the top job, it’s impossible to say at the moment. LFI and the Socialists are not speaking to each other because Mélenchon is set obdurately on trying to force Macron to resign, because he wants a final attempt at the job himself.
If this manoeuvre fails, and given that Macron is not going to resign under any foreseeable circumstances, he’s only left with two options. One is to dissolve Parliament anyway, the other is to ask the Left, through gritted teeth, to try to form a government. At the moment nobody can see how that could be accomplished, but stranger things have happened.
So, a new cabinet with four or maybe five prime ministers?
The last three PMs were not real PM, but just tasked to pass an austerity budget.
Michel Barnier failed.
François Bayrou bought the far-right RN by nominating a Minister of Interior even more right-wing than RN (Bruno Retailleau) and bought the Socialists by promising a big show on pensions (that discussion went nowhere, as planned), and got his budget through.
For Sebastien Lecornu, things are more difficult. On the one hand, the parties are preparing municipal elections in 2026, and the presidential elections in 2027. So the price of betrayal is way higher. And he has to make (empty) promises that don’t have the Socialists or RN look like fools.
On the other hand, french radio has it that Retailleau (minister in the government while formally the leader of an opposition party!) wanted to leave the Bayrou government with a bang to prepare that presidential election. So he made a stink this morning to get out and get his freedom back.
And I don’t exclude the possibility that all of this is for show. Retailleau has his way out, and Lecornu II can lower the price of betrayal, as it looks more like ‘saving our Republic and Institutions’.
I wonder how much time will pass until China buys the EU, country after country. They have the money, the resources and the know-how, and the (EU) elites only must change their target of ass licking: from US ass to China’s. In fact, I believe this was the traditional fear of the US elites, that’s the ultimate reason of the wild mistreatment the US gives the EU. That’s also the explanation of the unbelievable Russian patience about the EU, and the surprising interest from Russia to reestablish solid relations with the US.
But I don’t think there will be other outcome. The EU elites are not going to change in the near future, they are practically imbeciles, the problems are so much and of such a magnitude, that for people used to do nothing or near nothing changing the ass to lick is the easiest and straightforward way to solve their (self-made) problems in order to follow being a bunch of parasites.
EU member states can bar, as the US regularly does, having the Chinese or other foreign buyers obtain controlling stakes in major companies. They could also try to bar buying land (Thailand does not allow foreigners to own land and trying to attempt that through corporations with a nominee Thai majority owner is a fast track to having the transaction disallowed and ownership transfer to the corporation nullified).
This could apply to Japan, as well, though there are some *ahem* significant hurdles.
Nevertheless, as John Mearsheimer says, the view of Washington from Tokyo is likely becoming “the gang that can’t shoot straight” and who wants to be their sidekick?