Macron promised end to chaos. France has had four PMs in a year

On September 9, the prime minister of France was Sébastien Lecornu.

Lecornu resigned on 6 October after his proposed cabinet imploded due to internal disagreements.

Who will be the new prime minister? President Emmanuel Macron did not allow the 39-year-old to get out of this situation and gave Lecornu two days to find a solution that would prevent early parliamentary elections.

Forty-eight hours later, “outgoing prime minister” Lecornu announced that he had won a slim majority to avoid early elections and handed the responsibility back to his boss to announce a new Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister was announced on Friday. It was… Sébastien Lecornu.

Yes, it’s sad but true: France’s once venerable, gilded government institutions are now Spiderman meme.

This funhouse mirror politics is just the latest in a crisis that has been staggering since at least 2024, when Macron has called for early parliamentary elections to break the country’s political stalemate and return him a parliament without a majority split fairly evenly between three blocs where voters can’t or won’t work together.

Since then the country has gone through three Prime Ministers (four if you count Lecornu 1 as distinct from Lecornu 2… let’s not get deep into the weeds here), with both Michel Barnier and François Bayrou falling on their swords after a vote of no confidence.

It seems we need a new code of 21st century politics. If you’re like Macron and David Cameron before him, Present yourself as the alternative to “chaos”Then chaos itself will come for you in due time.

Meanwhile, National debt is multiplyingIt attracts the threat of EU sanctions and credit rating downgrades. The 2026 budget has not yet been passed, and getting it done will be Lecornu’s number one priority (other than preventing the government from collapsing once again, that is).

Macron, once seen by some as the shining hope for a third way in French politics, has become a lame duck, unable to follow through on much of his agenda despite the quasi-monarchical powers of the presidency. There is little incentive for any politician to work with him; The president has been abandoned by his former protégé, the prime minister. Gabriel Attal; Marcon’s first and most stable Prime Minister Edouard PhilippeHe called for his resignation. A recent front page of the left wing Liberation The president’s photograph was included in the newspaper with the following words:MACRON NAKED” is a mental image that many French people do not need on top of the political turmoil they have endured for more than a year.

While the left insisted it was their turn to appoint prime ministers, the traditional left-wing Socialist Party advocated taxes on the super-rich and repealing pension reform as conditions for any deal. But Macron has once again objected, and it is not in their interest to get closer to a man many French now regard as an enemy. dropped to just 14%. Far-right Marine Le Pen, meanwhile, has vowed to block anything the government proposes, regardless of whether her party accepts the policy.

Instead, the left, centre, right and far right are jockeying for space ahead of the 2027 presidential election. The French are no longer impressed by them. In a recent survey, 90 percent say the political class is not up to the job.

But the hopelessly divided nature of the national assembly mimics the hopelessly divided nature of the country, and it would be easy to boil the explanation down to the old cliché that “the French are ungovernable”. France’s malaises are familiar to much of the industrialized world; the poorest people do it the most, the richest are getting richer, social security budgets are spiraling, climate action is lacking, and many blame immigrants for their problems, fueled by the paranoid provocations of a media that has succumbed to the takeover of the far right and a political class that has failed them.

Whether this government and its potential successors will continue to crawl for another 18 months or see new elections soon is anyone’s guess; So does the question of whether France’s anti-far-right republican front has any chance of stopping Le Pen’s advance come these elections. (Whether he can run in 2027 depends on whether he appeals his conviction for embezzling European funds).

Macron, meanwhile, will focus on the external functions of his presidency to distract attention from so much going on at home. With Trump, Putin, Gaza and Ukraine on his list, he’ll have more than enough to get by.