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![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/immig.jpg\")
\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\nOn Friday, that PM was announced. It was\u2026 S\u00e9bastien Lecornu.<\/p>\n
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By continuing, you agree to our\u00a0Terms & Conditions<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yes, it\u2019s sad but true: France\u2019s once-venerable, gilded institutions of government have been reduced to a Spiderman meme<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n This funhouse mirror politics is just the latest in a crisis that has been lurching on since at least 2024, when Macron called snap parliamentary elections to break the country\u2019s political deadlock, only for voters to return him a parliament without a majority that is split fairly evenly between three blocs that cannot \u2014 or will not \u2014 work together.\u00a0<\/p>\n The country has burned through three PMs since then (four if you count Lecornu 1 as different from Lecornu 2\u2026 let\u2019s not get too deep into the weeds here), with both Michel Barnier and Fran\u00e7ois Bayrou falling on their swords after no confidence votes.\u00a0<\/p>\n It seems we need a new law of 21st century politics. If you, like Macron and David Cameron before him, present yourself as the alternative to \u201cchaos\u201d<\/a>, then chaos itself will come for you in due course.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the national debt is spiralling<\/a>, attracting the threat of EU sanctions and credit rating downgrades. The 2026 budget has not been passed, and getting it through will be Lecornu\u2019s number one priority (that is, apart from preventing the government from imploding once more).\u00a0<\/p>\n Macron, once seen by some as the shining hope for a third way in French politics, is reduced to a lame duck, unable to pursue much of his agenda despite the quasi-monarchical powers of the presidency. There is little incentive for any politician to work with him \u2014 the president has been abandoned by his former prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and prime minister, Gabriel Attal<\/a>; Marcon\u2019s first and most stable PM, Edouard Philippe<\/a>, has called for him to resign. A recent front page of the left-wing Liberation newspaper featured a picture of the president with the words \u201cMACRON NAKED<\/a>\u201d, a mental image many French people didn\u2019t need on top of the political pandemonium they have been enduring for more than a year now.\u00a0<\/p>\n The left insisted that it was their turn to put up a prime minister, with the traditional left Socialist Party advocating a tax on the superwealthy and a repeal of pension reform as a condition for any deal. But Macron once again demurred and it is not in their interest to cosy up to a man many French people now see as the enemy \u2014 the president\u2019s approval rating has plunged to just 14%<\/a>. Meanwhile, far-right Marine Le Pen has promised to block everything the government proposes regardless of whether her party agrees with the policy.\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead, left, centre, right and far right alike are all jockeying for place ahead of presidential elections in 2027. The French are no more impressed with them. In a recent poll, 90% said the political class were not up to the job<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tRelated Article Block Placeholder<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tArticle ID: 1200618\n\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t Yet the hopelessly divided composition of the national assembly mimics the hopelessly divided composition of the country, and to reduce the explanation for this to the old clich\u00e9 that \u201cthe French are ungovernable\u201d would be too easy. France\u2019s ailments are familiar to much of the industrialised world \u2014 the people with the least are doing it the hardest, the richest are getting richer, social security budgets are spiralling, climate action is lacking and many are blaming immigrants for their problems, stoked by the paranoid provocations of a media that has succumbed to far-right capture and a political class that is failing them.\u00a0<\/p>\n Whether this government and its potential successors continue to crawl on for another 18 months or whether we will soon see new elections is anyone\u2019s guess, as is the question of whether France\u2019s anti-far-right republican front has any chance of holding off Le Pen\u2019s advances when those elections do eventually come. (Whether she will be able to run in 2027 at all is dependent on her appealing her conviction for embezzling European funds<\/a>).\u00a0<\/p>\n Macron, meanwhile, will focus on the outward functions of his presidency to distract from the omnishambles at home. With Trump, Putin, Gaza and Ukraine on his docket, he\u2019ll have more than enough to get on with.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On September 9, the prime minister of France was S\u00e9bastien Lecornu.\u00a0 On October 6, after his proposed cabinet…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494732,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[23522,34,2000,299,36,38,44,12338],"class_list":{"0":"post-494731","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-david-cameron","9":"tag-emmanuel-macron","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-france","13":"tag-french-politics","14":"tag-marine-le-pen","15":"tag-sebastien-lecornu"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115363810107657401","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494731"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494731\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\t\t\t\t![\"Convicted](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/marone.jpg\")
\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n