Emmanuel Macron’s presidency is imploding, squeezed between enemies he can no longer outmanoeuvre. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, joined by the Socialists, have united to force yet another no-confidence vote, this time set for Thursday. Once the master of France’s centre, Macron’s political survival hinges on a humiliating surrender of his flagship pension reform, or a headlong rush into legislative elections his party cannot win.
Macron presents every decision as an act of duty, then retreats when his own powers are threatened. The result is a presidency that has lost its moral centre as well as its political one
The Lecornu government 2.0 was meant to buy Macron time. Instead, it’s turned into a countdown to collapse. Both Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise have filed motions of no confidence in the new government. Together they are within striking distance of bringing the government down. The arithmetic is brutal. According to Le Figaro, the censure motion is only 25 votes short of the 289 needed to bring Lecornu down. Those votes now belong to the Socialist party and they’re exacting their price.
The Socialists know that Macron’s survival depends entirely on them. Accordingly, Olivier Faure and his colleagues are making the President squirm. Their demands are simple but devastating: they’re asking Macron to drop his pension reforms altogether and promise not to invoke Article 49.3 to ram the budget through parliament. Either condition would shred the government’s authority. Yet the Socialists understand that Macron has no alternative. The centre he once dominated has shrunk to a handful of wavering independents. Without the left, Lecornu’s government will not last the week.
Macron faces a choice between humiliation and defeat. To keep the Socialists onside, he will have to abandon the pension reforms that defined his presidency. France was to move the retirement age from 62 to 64. For two years Macron and his governments have lectured France on fiscal responsibility, telling voters that without reform the entire system will collapse. Now, Macron may have to tear this up for the sake of his own political convenience. Even he must realise the damage this would do. To reverse his flagship reform would be to admit that he’s prepared to do anything for his own political survival.
That contradiction lies at the heart of Macronism. He presents every decision as an act of duty, then retreats when his own powers are threatened. The result is a presidency that has lost its moral centre as well as its political one. If he yields to Socialist pressure, he may save Lecornu 2.0 for a few more weeks, but at the cost of making his own survival pointless. The president who built his image on ‘responsibility’ would end up dismantling his signature reform to placate the very parties he once dismissed as relics of the old left.
Lecornu’s new cabinet offers no real protection. The appointees are for most part technocrats, loyal to Macron, and politically weightless. Twelve ministers from the previous team remain. The newcomers, Laurent Nunez at the Interior, Jean-Pierre Farandou at Work and Solidarities, Monique Barbut at Ecological Transition, are nods to the left rather than concessions to them.
Les Républicains, or LR, meanwhile, have fractured completely. Party leader Bruno Retailleau refused to enter government, yet several of his deputies joined anyway. Retailleau has expelled them all from LR, leaving Macron with a cabinet half-staffed by political orphans.
The budget battle has made this fragility impossible to disguise. France’s deficit stands at €60 billion, with Brussels demanding €44 billion in cuts. Lecornu can neither pass the budget without Socialist support nor risk forcing it through without detonating his own government. Every path leads to collapse.
Dropping the pension reform would destroy France’s credibility in Brussels and with investors, signalling that fiscal discipline has given way to political panic. France would look like a country that cannot keep its own accounts in order, forcing the technocrats in Brussels to step in and impose the discipline Macron’s failed to deliver. The symbolism for Macron himself would be devastating. The self-proclaimed champion of European sovereignty reduced to pleading for tolerance from the very institutions he claimed to lead. A president who once lectured Italy and Greece on fiscal responsibility would become the latest exhibit in Europe’s collection of fiscal failures. It would be the ultimate humiliation.
And as if to prove how detached he’s become, Macron has left for Egypt, declaring himself essential to the implementation of the Gaza peace deal. While Paris prepares for a no-confidence vote, the president is again trying to play statesman abroad. It’s the classic Macron manoeuvre. He’s cornered at home, so he poses as indispensable on the international stage.
The deeper truth is that Macron’s grand project is finally collapsing under its own contradictions. There is no centre left to hold. The Socialists sense weakness and are exploiting it. The LR is broken. The National Rally and LFI are united by a shared contempt for him. The Lecornu government is the last gasp of a system that has run out of steam. Macron began by promising to transcend France’s divisions. He now embodies them all. The only unity left is against him.
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