France’s caretaker prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has said his talks with various party leaders have revealed a “willingness” to pass a budget by the end of the year and that snap parliamentary elections are now looking less likely.
“This willingness creates a momentum and a convergence, obviously, which make the possibilities of a dissolution more remote,” he said in a brief address on Wednesday from the courtyard of Matignon Palace, the prime minister’s residence, in Paris.
Lecornu, who resigned on Monday after 27 days in office but was given 48 hours by Emmanuel Macron to try to rally support for the new government, said he would deliver his conclusions to the French president as planned later on Wednesday.
Macron was re-elected in 2022 for a second five-year term, but since snap legislative elections last summer, a hung parliament has ousted two successive prime ministers who failed to assemble a majority to back austerity budget plans.
Lecornu became the third to go when he tendered his government’s resignation just 14 hours after the new cabinet had been unveiled, saying opposition to the lineup from allies and opponents alike would make it impossible for him to do the job.
He said on Wednesday that reducing France’s ballooning budget deficit – projected to exceed 5.5% of GDP this year, almost twice the EU’s permitted limit – was “vital, including for France’s image abroad and for our capacity to borrow”.
The former defence minister, who was due to meet leftwing parties including the Socialist party (PS), Greens and Communists later on Wednesday, said “everyone was agreed” that the deficit must be brought “definitively” below 5% next year.
Those talks would establish “what concessions [the left] will demand of the other political groups in order to guarantee this stability, and also what concessions – if any – they are prepared to make in order to allow it”, he said.
All eyes are now on the PS after Lecornu appeared to offer an olive branch on Tuesday by suggesting Macron’s unpopular pension changes, pushed through in 2023, may be “suspended”, partly meeting the centre-left party’s demands that it be scrapped.
However, the leader of the PS, Olivier Faure, said after meeting Lecornu on Wednesday morning that he had “not received any guarantees” that the reform, which raised France’s retirement age from 62 to 64, would indeed be suspended.
If the PS and moderate left can be won over, a left-led cabinet backed by Macron’s centrist allies and centre-right MPs could be an option, but it would be fragile – and is not guaranteed the support of the centre-right, for whom changing the pension system is sacrosanct.
The Greens leader, Marine Tondelier, whose party is allied with the PS, said after meeting Lecornu that France had “never been closer” to getting a new leftwing prime minister, adding that another appointee from Macron’s camp “wouldn’t last a minute”.
Both the far-right National Rally (RN) and radical left France Unbowed (LFI) have promised to back a vote of no confidence in the new government. “I will block anything that comes from this government,” the RN’s leader, Marine Le Pen, said on Wednesday. “The joke has gone on long enough.”
LFI’s parliamentary group leader, Mathilde Panot, reiterated on Wednesday that its MPs would vote against “any government that persists with Macron’s policies” and would “not participate in saving Emmanuel Macron”.
Lecornu’s shock resignation was the latest twist in the political crisis that has gripped France since the snap 2024 election, which produced a parliament divided into three more-or-less equal blocs: the left, far right and Macron’s own centre-right alliance.
Macron has faced repeated opposition requests in recent days to hold snap elections or resign to end the crisis, with the far-right RN demanding a legislative ballot and radical left LFI calling for the president’s departure.
On Tuesday, even the beleaguered president’s former allies, including two former prime ministers, Edouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, distanced themselves from Macron, with Philippe going so far as to join demands for his early departure.
Macron has long said he is reluctant to hold fresh legislative elections, which polls suggest would probably return another divided parliament or usher in a far-right government, but has hinted he may do so if Lecornu’s mission fails.
He has repeatedly said he will not resign before the end of his mandate in 2027, when presidential elections are due that are seen as a watershed moment in French politics, with the far-right RN sensing its best chance of seizing power.
