PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron is running out of wiggle room. The abrupt resignation of his prime minister Monday, Macron’s fourth in more than a year of almost ceaseless political upheaval, puts the French leader in a bind. None of the options now look appealing for Macron, from his perspective at least. And for France, the road ahead promises more of the political uncertainty that is eroding investor confidence in the European Union’s second-largest economy and is frustrating efforts to rein in France’s damaging state deficit and debts. Domestic turmoil also risks diverting Macron’s focus from pressing international issues, wars in Gaza and Ukraine, security threats from Russia, and the muscular use of American power by US President Donald Trump, to name just some of those challenges. Here’s a closer look at the latest act in the unprecedented political drama that’s been roiling France since Macron stunned the nation by dissolving the national assembly in June 2024, triggering fresh legislative elections that then stacked Parliament’s powerful lower house with opponents of the French leader:
A 14-hour government collapses
When Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu tendered his resignation on Monday morning, he pulled the rug from under the new Cabinet that he’d named less than 14 hours earlier, on Sunday night. The collapse of the blink-and-you-missed-it government, with ministers out of a job before they’d even had a chance to settle in, was a bad look for Macron, bordering on farcical for his critics. It reinforced the impression that Macron, who famously described himself as “the master of the clocks,” firmly in control, on his way to winning the French presidency for the first time in 2017, is no longer in full command of France’s political agenda and that his authority is ebbing away. One of Macron’s loyal supporters, the just-reappointed but now outgoing ecology minister, Agnes Pannier-Runacher, captured the mood, posting: “Like many of you, I despair of this circus.” Perhaps more damaging for Macron were the reasons that Lecornu subsequently gave for his resignation, in an address on the front steps of L’Hotel de Matignon, the 18th century office of France’s prime ministers that, at this rate, may soon need fitting with a revolving door. The 39-year-old Lecornu explained that the job Macron had given him less than one month ago, after the French leader’s previous prime minister was tossed out by a national assembly vote, had proven to be impossible. Lecornu said three weeks of negotiations with political parties from across the political spectrum, unions and business leaders had failed to build consensus behind France’s top domestic priority: agreeing on a budget for the country for next year. “Being prime minister is a difficult task, doubtless even a bit harder at the moment, but one cannot be prime minister when the conditions aren’t fulfilled,” Lecornu said.
No tradition of coalitions
When the snap legislative elections called by Macron backfired, delivering a hung parliament since July 2024, the French leader held to the belief that his centrist camp could continue to govern effectively, despite having no stable majority, by building alliances in the national assembly. But the voting mathematics in the 577-seat chamber have been a recipe for turmoil, with lawmakers broadly split into three main blocs – left, center and far-right, and none with enough seats to form a government alone. France, unlike Germany, the Netherlands and some other countries in Europe, doesn’t have a tradition of political coalitions governing together. Macron’s political opponents in the national assembly, particularly those on the far left and far right, have been in no mood to play ball. Despite their own bitter ideological differences, they have repeatedly teamed up against the president’s prime ministers and their minority governments, toppling them one after another, and now seemingly convincing Lecornu that he’d be next to fall if he didn’t resign first. The left was mustering efforts to topple Lecornu’s new government as soon as this week, and the far right was signaling that it could vote against him, too. Having now burned since September 2024 through Gabriel Attal, Michel Barnier, Francois Bayrou and now close ally Lecornu as prime ministers, any successor Macron chooses will be on similarly shaky ground.
Another dissolution
The alternative for Macron would be dissolving parliament again, ceding to pressure from the far-right in particular for another unscheduled cycle of legislative elections. Macron has previously ruled out resigning himself, vowing to see out his second and last presidential term to its end in 2027. But new elections for the national assembly would be fraught with risk for the French leader. The far-right National Rally party of Marine Le Pen, already the largest single party, could come out on top, an outcome that Macron has long sought to avoid. That could leave Macron having to share power for the remainder of his time in office with a far-right prime minister. Macron’s unpopularity could also deliver a crushing defeat to his centrist camp, giving him even less sway in parliament than he has now and possibly having to make deals and share power with a stronger coalition of left-wing parties. Or France could get more of the same: political deadlock and turmoil that weakens the French leader at home but that doesn’t tie his hands on the world stage. “It’s not a very good image of stability but the central institution remains the president of the Republic,” said Luc Rouban, a political science researcher at Sciences Po university in Paris. “I don’t think Emmanuel Macron is going to resign. He remains the leader on international affairs. So he’ll stick to his positions on the situation in Ukraine, or the Middle East and relations with the United States.”
