Paris
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The French Prime Minister left after losing the trust vote that overthrew the government and plunging the country into a new political crisis.
Francois Beyloux submitted his resignation to President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday, and accepted it. A day ago, 364 of the 573 lawmakers voted against the Beyloux government after trying to force an unpopular plan to tame the French balloon budget deficit.
According to his fifth prime minister, Elise Palace, Macron will appoint a successor “in the coming days.”
Before he was expelled, Beaule warned that removing him would not solve the French challenges. “You have the power to overthrow the government, but you have no power to erase reality,” he told lawmakers. “The reality remains unforgiving. Costs continue to rise, and the burden of already unbearable debt will become heavier and more expensive.”
Macron is currently facing the challenge of pushing France out of the financial quagmire.
Chaos can be traced back to Macron’s dramatic decision last year to call for a snap vote. Challenging the incredible success of the far-right National Rally (RN) in the European elections in June 2024, the president rolled the dice in parliamentary votes. Gambling backfired, his centralist block lost seats on the far right and far left, making France virtually inordinated with a divided parliament.
But there was no need to do this. Founded in 1958 by President Charles de Gaulle, France’s Fifth Republic was designed to end the chronic instability that plagued the Third and Fourth Republics in the early 20th century. The new constitution has created a majority system to give executives broad powers and avoid short-lived governments. As a result, for decades, two mainstream parties on the left and right alternated power.
Macron blasted that order in 2017 and became the first president elected without the support of major established political parties. He was re-elected in 2022 and soon lost a majority in Congress due to extreme crowds of voters. Two years of fragile rules continued, and Macron repeatedly enforced Article 49.3 of the Constitution. It promoted the law without votes, increasing the dissatisfaction of many opposition lawmakers and the French people.
In the 2024 SNAP election, the left won most of the seats in the second round of the vote, but after the far right ruled the first, it still hadn’t reached a majority. However, when Macron refused to accept the Prime Minister’s choice, the left’s hopes of forming a minority government collapsed. Unlike Germany and Italy, France does not have a tradition of Union buildings. Instead, the politics have been shaped for over 60 years by a presidency-controlled system.
There is a French proverb, “Lemmes causes the ephetz of the prolonged remes.” The same cause has the same result. And for Macron, history certainly risks repeating itself, unless he can find a prime minister who can compromise on brokers.
The problem is that after three centristic prime ministers who have failed in the three-month tenure range between three months and nine months, the opposition parties are not in the mood to give another person a chance.
As a result, Macron gets caught up in a political vise, the far left is asking for his resignation, the far right is calling for a snap election, and the mainstream on the left and right are unable to reach consensus.
Who can take over next, and is it important?
The frontrunner to replace Bayrou appears to be Defence Minister Sebastian Lecorne. However, by choosing the Prime Minister from his own rank, Macron risks hearing Tone’s ears. This is a sign that he has not yet fully embraced the reality of Snap election defeat.
The logic behind Lecornu is that he can do business with socialists to make his budget even tasty. This is the same compromise that Bayrou pushed this year’s budget with a concession to the left. But that path now seems unfeasible.
Socialists want to tax the wealthy and roll back Macron’s tax cuts on business. As a centralist, Bayrou could not walk Lecornu, a tightrope walk further to the right, but he may not be as agile.
One potential blessing of salvation is that neither left nor right wants the snap election to be promoted by Marine Le Pen, the far-right figure. This gives you an incentive to cooperate, but there is no price.
Away from politics, the wider economic turmoil rattles French investors. The yields on French government bonds, or investors’ demands, exceed the interest rates on bonds in Spain, Portugal and Greece, once at the heart of the eurozone debt crisis. The potential downgrade of France’s sovereign debt rating review on Friday would bring another blow to the country’s economic position in Europe.
But following these turbulent years, the political situation is also bleak. If another SNAP parliamentary election occurs, a recent Elabe poll suggests that far-right RNs will emerge as the largest single party in the parliament.
Many in France now assume that the far right will ultimately take power – if not now, they do not believe that such outcomes will resolve the country’s problems after the 2027 presidential election.
The public’s trust in the political class is broken and anger is set to spill over the streets. The far left called for a nationwide protest against austerity on Wednesday. I vow to “Bloquons Tout” banner, and paralyze the country with disabilities and civil disobedience.
The resigning home minister warns of “severe confusion.” The union is planning another wave of mobilization on September 18th, with strikes expected across hospitals and rail services.
Dominique Mosy, senior analyst at Montaigne at the Paris-based think tank Institute, says he can’t remember such a deep deadlock moment in the Fifth Republic.
“Degaard survived an attempted assassination and there was the Algerian War.
“A change in the regime sounds inevitable, but we don’t know how it will happen or who will do the work. We are in the transition stage between a system that no longer works and a system that no one can imagine.”
