French President Emmanuel Macron called snap elections in July to get what he said would be a “clarification” from voters over the leadership and direction they wanted for the country.
The voters provided clarity with a stinging loss for his party and a hung parliament that has rebelled after only three months, toppling the president’s chosen prime minister, Michel Barnier, over a deficit-cutting budget.
There are now few easy solutions for Macron as he seeks a way out of a mess that his rivals (and even some of his allies) say is of his own making.
“It is hard to find a road to stability,” admitted François Patriat, a senator who has long supported Macron.
With his party shorn of its parliamentary majority, Macron was sidelined in domestic affairs during Barnier’s brief tenure, but the prime minister’s fall puts the president back in the driver’s seat temporarily.
Macron must now pick a new prime minister, who he will hope can last longer than Barnier, despite facing the same difficult parliamentary equation, where three blocs, none of which has a majority, vie for control.
A year-end deadline to pass next year’s budget is also looming, putting pressure on Macron to move quickly, although stop-gap measures can be enacted to avoid an US-style shutdown.
While it took the president two months to nominate Barnier, Macron will have to find a replacement more quickly this time. Any delay risks making him look weak while further unnerving financial markets — French borrowing costs soared last week over fears that Barnier’s budget gambit would fail.
Prolonged deadlock could also increase the drumbeat of demands for Macron to step down and call an early presidential election before the end of his term in 2027.
The president is due to address the nation on Thursday night to explain the way forward. He has already begun scouting out potential candidates for Matignon, the premier’s office, and is said to want to nominate someone in the coming days.
Names circulating in French media include loyalist Sébastien Lecornu; the defence minister François Bayrou, another ally and veteran centrist; and Bernard Cazeneuve, a former Socialist prime minister. A technocratic government run by a civil servant or non-political figure is also a possibility.
At stake for Macron is salvaging the remainder of his second term while protecting what is left of his record, especially on the economy, where he enacted business-friendly reforms and tax cuts.
But the president’s ability to impose a fix has been undermined by the shrinking of his centrist Renaissance party in the wake of July’s snap elections, with its remaining MPs no longer able to dictate terms to potential partners.
With little tradition of coalition building in France, Macron has been reduced instead to exhorting rival political parties to work together to deliver stability and at least pass a budget.
His task has been made harder because far-right leader Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National party, and the far-left France Unbowed, have been emboldened by their joint success in ousting Barnier.
Franck Allisio, a senior RN lawmaker, said the party would continue to push its priorities such as improving French people’s purchasing power and cutting immigration. “By definition our demands remain, whoever is prime minister, since the expectations of our voters have not changed,” said Allisio, who did not rule out the possibility that the party could topple the government again.
Coalition building is complicated further by the political heavyweights heading parliament’s various parties and factions all vying to succeed Macron.
“They are all obsessed by the 2027 election, which is shaping the behaviour of the party chiefs” like Le Pen and far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, said Jean Garrigues, a historian specialising in the French parliament and constitution. “That’s what makes it so hard to compromise in parliament.”
Some leading players have urged a different approach to choosing the next prime minister, suggesting that MPs instead negotiate a form of non-aggression pact among willing parties that would set out a few central policies to pursue in exchange for an agreement not to bring down the government.
Boris Vallaud, the head of the Socialist group in the assembly, has said he would be open to such an initiative, without clarifying whether the group would break fully from its current allies on the far left, who oppose all co-operation with Macron. Leftist leaders have signalled that they would demand Matignon in exchange for such co-operation, which risks being opposed by the RN.
Gabriel Attal, Macron’s former primer minister who heads the centrist Ensemble pour la Republique party, called for a similar alliance stretching from the moderate left to the moderate right, but excluding what he called “the extremes”.
“This would get us all out of the situation where the government is hostage to Marine Le Pen,” he said, although he admitted he did not know if it was possible.
Amid the intensifying politicking, a 2025 budget to replace the one scuppered by Wednesday’s vote — which was supposed to address France’s degraded public finances — must somehow still be passed.
If parliament and the government cannot meet a constitutional deadline to pass one — which has only happened twice in modern French history — there may have to be temporary fixes, such as the adoption of an emergency law and executive measures to roll over tax and spending rules from the previous year.
Analysts at investment bank Morgan Stanley, who believe this is the most likely scenario, say it would increase the 2025 deficit to 6.3 per cent — up from about 6.1 per cent this year — compared with the 5.6 per cent predicted under Barnier’s belt-tightening plan.
The temporary fixes “would lead to a budget in 2025 that wouldn’t have the tax rises that were planned in the current plan, which would have enabled the reduction of the deficit,” said Jean-François Ouvrard, executive director for economic research at Morgan Stanley.
A worst-case scenario would be the unprecedented failure to enact a full 2025 budget once a new government was in place in January.
“This is where we get into uncharted territory,” said constitutional law expert Denis Baranger of the Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas. “This is a moment that is not really foreseen in the constitution.”
Illustration by Aditi Bhandari