FOR THE third time in little over a year, France looks likely to lose its prime minister. François Bayrou’s decision on August 25th to put his government’s survival on the line with a vote of confidence on September 8th was as unexpected as it was risky. The centrist prime minister runs a minority government in a deadlocked parliament split into three blocs, two of which are set on bringing him down. The 74-year-old Mr Bayrou will need to muster uncommon political skill if he is to keep the job he secured less than nine months ago after his predecessor, Michel Barnier, was toppled. Markets are already nervous as France heads into yet another spell of political instability. After Mr Bayrou’s announcement the yield spread on French ten-year bonds compared to German bunds, the euro zone’s benchmark, widened from 0.69 to 0.73.
The end of the summer was always going to be a tricky political moment for Mr Bayrou. He has been putting together a budget for 2026, which includes the promise of €44bn ($51bn) in savings in order to try to curb the budget deficit from 5.4% of GDP in 2025 to a still-too-high 4.6% in 2026. These include plenty of unpopular measures, notably the abolition of two of the country’s 11 public holidays. Time spent on the beach this summer seems only to have hardened popular hostility to losing those extra days off. Fully 84% told a poll in August that they were against the idea, up from 73% in July.
Rather than wait to put his unpopular budget to parliament, however, Mr Bayrou has gone for a pre-emptive strike. “Our country is in danger”, he declared in a grave and martial tone on the afternoon of August 25th. France’s public debt, at 114% of GDP, is lower only than that of Greece and Italy within the EU. “Dependence on debt has become chronic,” Mr Bayrou went on. France this year will spend more on servicing debt (€66bn) than on either education or defence, he noted. Mr Bayrou, who campaigned for the French presidency in 2012 on a crusade against the country’s addiction to public spending, urged parliament to take seriously the risk of doing nothing. The vote of confidence next month, he said, would not concern the budget measures themselves, but a simple question: does parliament agree that there is a “national emergency” that requires fixing the public finances?
Mr Bayrou is right about the dismal state of French public finances. France has not balanced a budget since 1974. During the pandemic and after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Emmanuel Macron’s previous governments spent lavishly on protecting the French from inflation and higher energy bills. This pushed up debt, yet secured no political gratitude in return. The prospect of another French government falling over the budget is unnerving markets. Since August 12th France has been paying higher borrowing costs than Greece. In early trading on August 26th French banks took a knock. Société Générale lost 6.31% of its value and BNP Paribas 5.75%.
None of this seems to have convinced the opposition parties. Despite Mr Bayrou’s efforts over the summer, including the posting of a series of worthy educational YouTube videos, there is still no political consensus about the gravity of the moment. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the hard-left Unsubmissive France, accused Mr Bayrou of wanting to dramatise the situation. His party will vote against the government. So will Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally, which forms the second-biggest opposition bloc in parliament to Mr Macron’s centrists. She has called on the president to dissolve parliament, and hold fresh elections, an option Mr Macron seemed to rule out in comments made to Paris Match magazine earlier this month. If he loses another government, he is constitutionally allowed to appoint yet another without returning to the ballot box.
Mr Bayrou is a canny old-timer with a knack of manoeuvring himself to where he wants to be, but he is now treading a perilous line. To survive, he needs a majority of those present in parliament on September 8th. Yet even those more moderate parties that supported him earlier this year, notably the Socialists, suggest that they will not do so again. It is hard to see how the numbers can add up for him. By seeking to call out the opposition parties on a pressing and simple question, Mr Bayrou has taken a principled stand and a political gamble. It is a sorry reflection of France’s polarised politics that his government may now fall because opposition parties cannot even agree that uncontrolled debt and deficit levels are putting the country in danger.
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