A politically paralyzed France has had four prime ministers in the past 20 months and appears on the verge of adding a fifth, a degree of instability suggestive of institutional crisis and unknown since the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
François Bayrou, a centrist prime minister who has been in office for about nine months, three times as long as his predecessor, has called a vote of confidence for Monday in what appears to be a suicidal move. The vote centers on his unpopular austerity budget proposal, designed to confront a severe deficit and a worsening national debt, in part by freezing welfare payments at their current levels.
Both the far-right National Rally party led by Marine Le Pen and a group of left and far-left parties have said they will oppose Mr. Bayrou. This would ensure the fall of the government, a political void and renewed pressure on President Emmanuel Macron, who has become an isolated figure.
The far right and the left hold 330 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament. A majority of votes cast in opposition to Mr. Bayrou would be enough to bring his government down.
With Parliament divided into far-right, centrist and left-wing blocs, each large enough to create an impasse, France has been in a state of ominous drift since Mr. Macron called snap parliamentary elections in June 2024, another apparently capricious gesture that upended French politics.
Just 15 percent of the electorate has confidence in Mr. Macron, according to an opinion poll this month for Le Figaro Magazine by the Verian Group, down six percentage points since July. The poll showed that 14 percent of respondents supported Mr. Bayrou, a degree of unpopularity almost unknown for a French prime minister.
Mr. Macron, who is term-limited and will leave office in 2027, has been president for more than eight years, having transformed French politics by creating a new movement of the center that swept him to power in 2017 and swept away the long dominance of the center-left Socialist Party and center-right Republicans.
The change was at first bracing but has over time made France nearly ungovernable, with the old alternation between moderate left and right replaced by the growing dominance of political extremes in a country with no tradition of compromise and coalition building of the kind found in Italy or Germany.
The Fifth Republic was created by Charles de Gaulle precisely to overcome parliamentary paralysis through a strong, highly centralized presidential system. It worked until, over the past 14 months, it didn’t.
As Alexandre Viala, a professor of public law at the University of Montpellier, wrote in the daily Le Monde, “When a new tripartite balance of power is ill adapted to a regime that is slow to evolve, the parliamentary and governmental machine grinds to a halt.” If Mr. Bayrou’s government falls, as expected, Professor Viala suggested, “the debate around the eventual resignation of Emmanuel Macron will be harder and harder to avoid.”
Mr. Macron, a fighter by nature, has dismissed such suggestions. But the far left and the far right have made no secret of seeking his immediate downfall in order to provoke an early presidential election.
Mr. Bayrou’s fall would force the president to choose a new prime minister, a possibly futile exercise given recent precedent, or to call a new parliamentary election, which several polls suggest would see the National Rally comfortably come out on top. Mr. Macron has indicated he wants to avoid another election.
The economic consequences of this political paralysis have been grave. The French budget deficit is now nearly $198 billion, or 5.8 percent of economic output, well above the 3 percent limit set by the European Union for countries using the euro currency. The national debt tops $3.93 trillion, or 114 percent of economic output, with the result that annual interest on the debt is projected to balloon to more than $77 billion.
France may not be about to go bankrupt, but a pivotal battle clearly looms over spending on its cherished social safety net, which includes education, health care and pensions.
Any attempt to curtail social benefits is near anathema in France, as was made clear by an intense conflict in 2023 over Mr. Macron’s decision to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62, and by the furious response to Mr. Bayrou’s current proposal to eliminate two public holidays in order to increase production and raise tax revenue.
Both the far left and the right oppose such measures and contest Mr. Macron’s business-friendly policies. These have lowered unemployment and drawn foreign investment but also involved tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy that have cost the French state tens of billions of dollars in lost annual revenue.
Mr. Bayrou, 74, a Christian Democrat with a philosophical bent who seems determined to become a martyr for the truth of the unsustainable imbalance between French revenue and French spending, explained his decision to call a vote in an RTL interview last week: “There are worse catastrophes in life than the fall of a government.”
Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist.
Liz Alderman is the chief European business correspondent, writing about economic, social and policy developments around Europe.
Aurelien Breeden is a reporter for The Times in Paris, covering news from France.
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