Emmanuel Macron will not name a prime minister from the left later on Friday, leftist party chiefs said after talks with the French president, with their indignant response suggesting his future government will be as fragile as those that preceded it.
Macron summoned mainstream party chiefs to the Elysee on Friday, hoping to win their support for a new prime minister – his sixth in under two years – ahead of a self-imposed deadline later in the evening.
France is in the midst of a spiralling political crisis as a series of minority governments struggle to push belt-tightening budgets through a deeply divided parliament. To resolve the crisis, some of Macron’s political foes have said he should either call fresh legislative elections or resign, measures he has so far sought to avoid.
After leaving Friday’s meeting, leftist party chiefs said Macron had said he did not plan to name a leftist prime minister, a position they believe is their right after the president’s previous centrist picks were toppled by lawmakers unwilling to stomach proposed budget cuts.
They said Macron offered to delay the application of his contentious pension reform until after the 2027 presidential election – a proposal they said didn’t go far enough.
“We’re not looking for a dissolution of parliament, but we’re not scared of it either,” Socialist party chief Olivier Faure told reporters after the meeting, which did not include the far-right National Rally (RN) and hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) – two of the largest parties in the National Assembly.
Centrist and centre-right party chiefs did not comment to reporters after leaving the meeting.
A source close to Macron said the meeting had shown it remains possible to find a compromise that will resolve the crisis and avoid a dissolution of parliament. The source confirmed Macron’s offer to delay some of the pension reform effects by a year.
WHO MIGHT MACRON APPOINT AS PRIME MINISTER?
All eyes will now turn to whom Macron will name as prime minister – and whether they can survive in the post long enough to pass a 2026 budget, due by year’s-end.
The daily Le Parisien newspaper reported that Macron intended to reappoint Sebastien Lecornu, who resigned as prime minister on Monday after just 27 days in the post. Lecornu did not attend the meeting at the Elysee, which did not respond to a request for comment about his potential reappointment.
Other names that have been floated in political circles include veteran centrist Jean-Louis Borloo, the head of the public auditor Pierre Moscovici, and Nicolas Revel, a technocrat who leads the Paris hospitals administration.
Reappointing Lecornu would risk alienating the political leaders whose backing Macron needs to form a broad-based government that can get a budget over the line, and could force him into calling a snap election.
SNAP ELECTION WOULD POSE RISKS FOR MAINSTREAM PARTIES
France’s mainstream parties are keen to avoid a snap election. Opinion polls suggest the RN would be the main beneficiary and that another hung parliament would be the most likely result.
The central bank chief, Francois Villeroy de Galhau, on Friday forecast the crisis would cost the economy 0.2 percentage points of gross domestic product growth. Business sentiment was suffering but the economy was broadly fine, he said.
“Uncertainty is … the number one enemy of growth,” Villeroy told RTL radio.
Villeroy said it would be preferable if the deficit did not exceed 4.8% of GDP in 2026. The deficit is forecast to hit 5.4% this year, nearly double the European Union’s cap.
Macron’s second-to-last prime minister, Francois Bayrou, was ousted by the National Assembly over his plans for 44 billion euros in savings to bring the deficit down to 4.6%.
Rating agencies issued a fresh round of warnings about France’s sovereign credit score this week after Lecornu said on Monday his government was resigning, just 14 hours after he had announced his cabinet line-up.
