France’s political crisis this past week has been equal parts absurd and electrifying. On October 5, President Emmanuel Macron’s latest prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, announced a roster of ministers largely identical to the one his predecessor, François Bayrou, cobbled together last December, before falling to a no-confidence vote.
That was until the following morning, October 6, when it was announced that Lecornu had handed in his resignation already, and that the president had accepted it. Then, on October 10, following negotiations between Lecornu and political forces in search of a governing majority, Macron announced his next prime minister — Lecornu, again. Now the second Lecornu government faces the imminent threat of a confidence vote.
In the days leading up to this bathetic conclusion, Macron was filmed walking in rather agitated mood along the banks of the Seine. Rumors of the president dissolving parliament and calling another set of snap elections, or even being forced to resign, echoed loudly across Paris’s political class. Macron’s camp is far short of a majority in the National Assembly, even with right-wing allies.
“There’s every indication that Macron’s strategy is to let things deteriorate until another dissolution,” one former member of Macron’s party, Renaissance, told me before Lecornu was reappointed last Friday.
Already on his initial appointment, Lecornu was France’s third prime minister in under a year, and Macron’s fifth since being reelected in 2022. His struggle to form a minority government is the culmination of Macron’s deep autocratic impulses, which have come closer to the surface over nearly a decade in power.
Lecornu is a capable and unflinching executor of Macron’s agenda,…
Auteur: Marlon Ettinger
