It seemed last week that France’s prime minister Sebastien Lecornu had successfully defied expectations and a parliamentary gridlock, prolonging the life of the shaky administration he put in place when reappointed in October. Albeit this came at the heavy price of undoing President Emmanuel Macron’s flagship but divisive pension reform.
However it now appears to have been another false dawn for France’s latest government - three successive prime ministers have fallen since last December including Lecornu himself. By Friday, it was clear that all he had achieved was a temporary, precarious reprieve. He remains in power, but powerless, unable to approve any spending let alone tackle the public finances.
As the state budget deadline loomed, representatives of the French Senate and the lower house failed again to agree, and so the government by means of a stopgap emergency “special law”, will only be able to roll over this year’s spending,.
So much for Macron’s promise to EU partners of a two-year €6.5 billion increase in defence spending and, critically, for his ability to reduce the booming deficit to under 5 per cent of GDP in 2026. France’s public debt has now reached €3.482 trillion, 117.4 per cent of GDP, a record outside times of war or pandemic The government may struggle on, but the markets are likely to be most unforgiving – France’s sovereign debt rating has already been downgraded repeatedly.
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Tuesday’s breakthrough approval of the budget’s social security provisions was made possible because Lecornu persuaded the Socialist Party to back it with concessions on spending, particularly the postponement of the retirement age hike. These lost him support among the vital centrist supporters on whom he depended for the rest of his now-stymied budget.
Minority rule and the three-way parliamentary gridlock– the left, the unsteady centrist, soft-right Macron allies, and the hard right – remain the order of the day. Lecornu can only muddle along without passing any significant legislation. A snap election would only replicate the gridlock.
