Caretaker French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has played down the prospect of a dissolution of parliament following talks with political parties to form a coalition and pass an austerity budget to resolve the nation’s worst political turmoil in years.
The talks showed a desire to pass the proposed budget cuts by the end of the year, Lecornu said, following an impasse which has prompted calls for embattled President Emmanuel Macron to step down.
“This willingness creates a momentum and a convergence, obviously, which make the possibilities of a dissolution more remote,” Lecornu said in a speech on Wednesday at Paris’s Matignon Palace.
Lecornu, who himself resigned on Monday after less than a month in power, said he would present a plan to Macron later on Wednesday.
The plan is the latest development in a political crisis that started when Macron called snap elections last year. His goal was to get a stronger majority in parliament, but he instead finished with an even more fractious assembly.
This plunged France into deeper political chaos: with no governing majority, the parliament has been unable to approve the budget to narrow France’s growing debt.
To resolve the deadlock, Macron appointed three prime ministers who either failed to secure a majority or resigned, including Lecornu.
Meanwhile, opposition parties have been seizing the momentum. A leading figure of far-right National Rally (NR) party, Marine Le Pen, has once again called for Macron to resign before the president’s term ends in 2027.
“Let’s return to the ballot box,” Marine Le Pen said on Monday. “The French must decide, that is clear,” she told reporters. Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, NR’s president, refused to join negotiations with Lecornu , French media reported on Tuesday, saying that such talks did not serve the interest of French citizens but rather those of Macron.
They called instead for the dissolution of the National Assembly. Following last year’s elections, NR won more seats than any other, but not enough to form a majority.
In September, a poll by TF1-LCI showed that more than 60 percent of French voters approved new elections. And should those take place, the leaders of the NR would lead the race’s first round, according to a poll by Ifop Fiducial.
Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the far-left France Unbowed party, and Francois-Xavier Bellamy, head of the right-wing Republicans party, also called for the president to resign.
The political chaos is not only emboldening Macron’s rivals, it is also turning his allies away.
“I no longer understand the decision of the president. There was the dissolution and since then, there’s been decisions that suggest a relentless desire to stay in control,” said Gabriel Attal, leader of the president’s centrist party.
“People are abandoning him on all sides, it’s clear that he is responsible for the political crisis which gets worse each day,” said political analyst Elisa Auange. “He seems to be making all the wrong decisions.”
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