Why France's PM went all-in and what it means for the country
8 September is almost certain to become the final day of France’s current government, thereby triggering a new political crisis.
On that day, the French National Assembly is set to vote on a motion of confidence in the government of François Bayrou. This vote was initiated by the prime minister himself.
Bayrou’s decision has turned out to be a real gift for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, which openly says it expects snap parliamentary elections, where it now has a realistic chance of winning a majority.
Read more about whether there is any way to avoid this scenario, why the seasoned politician François Bayrou chose this path and what he hopes to achieve are explained in the article by Yurii Panchenko, European Pravda's editor: The prime minister’s "suicide": why France’s government will resign and what consequences this will have.
On 25 August, François Bayrou declared that France is "on the verge of losing debt sustainability."
According to the French prime minister, this situation forces the government to introduce radical deficit-reduction measures in the 2026 state budget, savings amounting to €43.8 billion. Without such measures, France’s borrowing costs would soon exceed the yields on Italian government bonds, making it increasingly difficult for the country to service its public debt.
The planned savings would come both through "social justice" – i.e. higher taxes on the super-rich – and through openly unpopular steps: freezing indexation of social benefits and pensions, cutting spending on public health insurance, shutting down certain state agencies and eliminating two of the eleven public holidays (Easter Monday and 8 May).
The government also proposes gradually reducing the number of civil servants in the coming years, one out of every three vacated posts due to retirements would be scrapped.
Debate on these budget initiatives was scheduled to begin on 10 September. But it was already clear that the government would not secure enough votes to pass them. To make matters worse, the left-wing opposition announced it would launch mass anti-government protests on the same day.
That is why Bayrou’s resignation was expected: without parliamentary support for "normal" budget approval, the prime minister would have no choice but to use the constitutional "special procedure 49.3," which allows a bill to pass without a parliamentary vote.
Realising that resignation was nearly inevitable, PM Bayrou decided to go all-in. He announced that he himself would initiate a confidence vote in his government – to be held two days before the planned protests.
Why did the French prime minister take such a step?
In recent days, François Bayrou has often referred to Pierre Mendès France – the left-centrist politician and prime minister in 1954, remembered as a head of government whose ideas were initially unpopular but later recognised as farsighted.
Bayrou hopes for a similar role in history: a prime minister who forced the French to confront the need to revise fiscal policy even at the cost of his own resignation.
Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally does not hide that it is already preparing for new parliamentary elections. The party hopes that the current political chaos has so exhausted the French public that they will be ready to vote for them, simply to bring in a government with a stable majority.
But how justified are the opposition’s expectations of inevitable snap parliamentary elections?
President Emmanuel Macron has shown himself to be a politician willing to take risks. It is therefore possible that he already has a plan to emerge from this crisis, for example, by moving toward a "German-style" electoral system that would make one-party governments impossible and force parties to negotiate coalition agreements.