French lawmakers passed a no-confidence measure against Prime Minister Michel Barnier and his cabinet on Wednesday, sending the country into a fresh spasm of political turmoil that leaves it without a clear path to a new budget and threatens to further jolt financial markets.
France’s lower house of Parliament passed the measure with 331 votes, a majority, after Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally joined moves by the chamber’s leftist coalition to oust the government. Mr. Barnier is expected to resign soon.
It was the first successful no-confidence vote in France in over 60 years and made Mr. Barnier’s three-month-old government the shortest-tenured in the history of France’s Fifth Republic.
The vote comes at a difficult time for France, which is struggling with high debt and a widening deficit, challenges that have been compounded by two years of flat growth. France’s strong backing for Ukraine faces a challenge with the United States’ election of Donald J. Trump, and its partner in leading Europe, Germany, is weaker politically and economically than it has been in years.
President Emmanuel Macron, the nation’s top leader, remains in power but support for him is shaky. His stature has been severely diminished following his surprise decision last summer to call a snap parliamentary election. His party and its allies lost many seats to the far right and the left, competing forces that bitterly oppose him.
Mr. Barnier is likely to remain as a caretaker until Mr. Macron names a new prime minister, but France faces weeks of instability, just as it did after the parliamentary vote.
In 1962, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou was also forced to submit his resignation, but he was later reappointed by President Charles de Gaulle. The same clemency is unlikely to be shown to Mr. Barnier.
Mr. Barnier, a veteran center-right politician, is the most prominent victim yet of France’s polarized politics, unsettled by a middle class that is struggling, as elsewhere in the West.
The rapid fall seemed inevitable after Mr. Barnier used a constitutional tool to force through a budget proposal on Monday without the approval of Parliament’s lower house, where he does not hold a majority. Use of that tool always raises the hackles of France’s lawmakers.
But on Wednesday, it did far more, providing the glue for an unlikely alliance between the assembly’s leftist coalition and the nationalist, anti-immigrant National Rally, which holds the most seats for a single party in the chamber.
The downfall of Mr. Barnier and his cabinet was a victory for Ms. Le Pen, who has tried for years to project her growing political influence and to bring her party into the mainstream.
It was she who insisted on pursuing the vote, ensuring his downfall. The left-wing alliance has been agitating for months to oust the government, arguing that together they had won the most seats in the snap election this summer and so deserved to lead. But it lacked the votes to topple the prime minister.
And before the vote, Ms. Le Pen refused the concessions that Mr. Barnier offered her on the budget. First, he jettisoned proposed electricity taxes. Then he promised not to cut back medication reimbursements. She had demanded both changes.
It was not enough for Ms. Le Pen. The budget, with its $60 billion in spending cuts and tax increases, remained “profoundly unjust to the French,” she said on Monday.
Inside the assembly, her dominance was acknowledged. “Ms. Le Pen, why do you, how could you, allow your votes, those of your group, to be joined with those of the far left?” Mr. Barnier’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, pleaded with her on Tuesday. Ms. Le Pen just smiled and shook her head.
Already, speculation about a possible successor to Mr. Barnier as prime minister has centered on politicians seen by the National Rally as more open to discussion, like the defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu.
Ms. Le Pen’s criticism of Mr. Barnier and his austerity plans for France seem to form part of a larger political strategy, according to critics and some independent analysts.
She has all but acknowledged that her real target is not Mr. Barnier, but the only man who wields more power: Mr. Macron, who has twice beaten her in presidential elections and is not permitted to run again. Some in her party and on the far left have been calling on him to resign for days.
Ms. Le Pen told journalists for Le Monde last week that, confronted with enough government instability, Mr. Macron “won’t have very much choice” but to resign.
Analysts and those around Mr. Macron say it is unlikely that he would do so. The president recently called the idea “political fiction.” But his position is weak, severely damaged by his decision last June to dissolve the Parliament and call a snap election. He called the vote partly to demonstrate that the National Rally’s support was limited — a calculation that has clearly backfired.
Ms. Le Pen has targeted the president as much as the prime minister in her remarks in recent days. It was Mr. Barnier’s budget, she told reporters on Monday, but it would have made the French pay for “the consequences of the incompetence of Emmanuel Macron during seven years of debt.”
“She really seems to want to put herself in a position of strength,” said Gérard Grunberg, a political scientist and emeritus professor at Sciences Po university in Paris. “She wants to trigger a presidential election.”
Mr. Macron has succeeded in bringing down chronically high French unemployment and he has boosted French growth, moderately. But he has also been unpopular for much of his presidency: Many French regard him as aloof and arrogant.
“Macron has lost all legitimacy,” said Mr. Grunberg. “He doesn’t exist, in a sense. He’s dead, politically.”
Mr. Macron has given no indication that he won’t finish his term, which ends in mid-2027. Ms. Le Pen, however, may be on an accelerated timeline, according to critics. She is scheduled to face a verdict in a wide-ranging criminal embezzlement case in March, which could render her ineligible to run for political office for five years. She and associates in the party are accused of misusing their European Parliament assistants by putting them to work on National Rally issues.
“The problem is Ms. Le Pen’s trial,” said Alain Minc, a political essayist, businessman and informal adviser to several French presidents.
“If she didn’t have that risk of being ineligible, her strategy would have been to remain moderate, to improve her image and wait for the presidential election,” he said. “What has dramatically changed her position is the risk of losing all her political capital in three months’ time.”
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