Posted on 09/08/25
| News Source: WSJ
President Emmanuel Macron has lost his second government in less than a year, a measure of how France is caught in a spiral of political dysfunction that is draining its public finances.
A no-confidence motion against the government of Prime Minister François Bayrou won the support of 364 lawmakers in the 577-seat National Assembly, forcing him to tender his resignation.
The fall of Bayrou, a centrist ally of Macron, after less than nine months in office deepens the country’s paralysis at a time when investors are questioning whether France can muster the political will to rein in its ballooning budget deficit.
“You have the power to overthrow the government, but you don’t have the power to erase reality,” Bayrou told lawmakers at the National Assembly, moments before the vote, describing France’s finances as “a silent, underground, invisible, and unbearable hemorrhage.”
Whomever Macron names as his next prime minister will have to cajole lawmakers in the National Assembly, the highly fragmented lower house of Parliament, to agree on next year’s budget by the end of December. France is also facing a gauntlet of public protests against any cuts to public spending, starting with a Wednesday demonstration organized by the “Let’s Block Everything” movement.
Lawmakers on the far left are demanding that Macron himself step down—something he has repeatedly said he won’t do before his term ends in 2027. And Macron doesn’t plan to call snap parliamentary elections, a maneuver that cost his party dozens of seats in 2024 and led to the lower house’s current fragmentation.