PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron’s escape route out of the political and economic crisis gripping France now looks almost impossibly narrow.
On Monday, his key ally Prime Minister François Bayrou was toppled in a bloodbath of a no-confidence vote, with 364 lawmakers voting to oust him and only 194 coming out in support.
Macron’s office promptly said he would move in “the next few days” to appoint the country’s fifth prime minister in less than two years, but there are grave doubts that the new appointee will prove any more successful than Bayrou in forcing through the tens of billions of euros of budget cuts needed to save the EU’s second-biggest economy from a ballooning debt crisis.
Macron is now squarely in the line of public fire, ahead of threats of a national shutdown on Sept. 10 and major protests planned by trade unions on Sept. 18. The president’s popularity has dropped to an all-time low, with polls showing he is more unpopular today than at the peak of the Yellow Vest protests in 2018 and 2019, one of the gravest crises of his tenure.
Ever confident in his ability to wriggle, Houdini-like, out of the worst of tangles, Macron is still holding out for a deal with the moderate left, the centrists and the conservative Les Républicains party to form a minority government that can finally reach an agreement over the budget.
But Macron is almost certainly clutching at straws in a country that looks increasingly ungovernable. The scale of Bayrou’s defeat in parliament on Monday and the signals emerging from lawmakers already suggest his efforts are doomed from the outset.
Macron tries to hold the center
During a day of high drama in parliament, opposition parties rounded on Macron as the protagonist responsible for the stalemate engulfing France.
“There is only one person responsible for the crisis, for the fiasco and instability, it’s the president of the Republic,” said Boris Vallaud, the Socialist Party’s parliamentary leader.
Communist parliamentary leader Stéphane Peu likened the crisis to “Saving Private Ryan” with Bayrou being “the fourth prime minister to fall to save President Macron.”
After the vote, many called for Macron to step down. “The president doesn’t want to change his policies? Well, we’ll have to change president,” said Mathilde Panot, parliamentary head of the far-left France Unbowed party.
Macron faces an intense challenge in keeping the center together, while the far-right National Rally — the party that tops the polls — and the far left are on an anti-establishment blitz, threatening to bring down any future administrations that slash public spending.
Consolidating the middle ground is difficult because the center-left Socialists and center-right Les Républicains disagree fundamentally on economic policy aims, despite growing fears that France’s inability to put its books in order could ultimately put a strain on the EU’s finances.
All eyes on the Socialists
In his valedictory speech before the National Assembly, Bayrou warned against complacency about the depths of France’s financial mess, saying the nation suffers from a “life-threatening” level of debt.
“You have the power to overthrow the government” but not “to erase reality,” he told lawmakers.
But very quickly, opposition leaders were already looking to the post-Bayrou scenarios.
Sensing an opportunity for the left, the Socialist Vallaud called on the liberal President Macron to “do his duty” and appoint a prime minister from their ranks. “We are ready, come and get us,” he said.
He touted “another path” for France that would include what he described as a fairer tax policy, and said the Socialists would row back on Bayrou’s proposed cancellation of two bank holidays.
By Monday evening, all sorts of scenarios involving the Socialist Party were being floated.
These included a grand coalition running from the conservatives to the Socialists (which is the least likely) and a non-aggression pact that would see the Socialists refraining from toppling a center-right government, led by a left-leaning centrist, in exchange for budget concessions. Also being discussed is a similar arrangement with Les Républicains, which would see the latter refrain from toppling a government from the left in return for concessions on the budget.
The left-right tightrope
Theoretically, a government backed by both the Socialists and Les Républicains would have wider support in parliament than Bayrou’s outgoing center-right government.
But why would the Socialists and Les Républicains — generally at daggers drawn — actually work together? There is a glimmer of a chance they might see it makes sense to compromise now to keep their parliamentary seats rather than push France into more chaos and risk losing them in a snap election.
In reality, though, the risks of failure are high.
Laurent Wauquiez, Les Républicains’ parliamentary leader, warned on Monday his party would not support a Socialist government that is too deeply inspired by other more radical left-wing parties with which they stood in last year’s election, as part of a pan-leftist grouping called the New Popular Front.
“We would never accept the nefarious political platform of the New Popular Front,” said Wauquiez. “And that obviously applies to any Socialist government that carries the ideas of the New Popular Front.”
Additionally, with local elections set for March 2026, no opposition parties will really want to ally themselves with a president surround by an aura of fin de règne.
And even if the top brass in the centrist parties agreed to cooperate on a budget, there is no guarantee that rank-and-file lawmakers would follow.
Take the Bayrou vote as an example: On Monday, Les Républicains were conspicuously divided on the no-confidence vote, with 27 voting to support Bayrou and 13 against, despite calls from Les Républicains’ head and Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau to back the government.
Far-right leader Marine Le Pen also cast doubt on Macron’s ability to hold the center, and to get any left-right alliance to agree on a budget. The only option, as she saw it, was to call an election.
“Dissolving parliament will not be option, but an obligation,” she said.
But that election would also probably do little to heal the divisions at the heart of the crippling national impasse.
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