“The head of state could only appoint a cabinet that was resolved to continue the policies that had been pursued up to this point,” said those close to President Alexandre Millerand in Le Matin newspaper. In May 1924, when the leftwing alliance called the Cartel des Gauches narrowly won the general election, the then president of France did not care: he tasked one of his allies, the minister Frédéric François-Marsal, with forming a minority government. On June 10th, the ministerial line-up was announced; on June 11th, it resigned, brought down by the leftwing parliamentary majority.
More than a century later, the record for the shortest-lived government was broken by Sébastien Lecornu on the morning of Monday October 6th. The prime minister handed his resignation to President Emmanuel Macron 836 minutes or just shy of 14 hours after announcing the make-up of his government team. “Mr Sébastien Lecornu has handed the resignation of his government to the President of the Republic, who has accepted it,” said the Élysée in a statement sent to newsrooms shortly before 10 am this Monday.
The short-lived head of government spoke from the prime minister's official residence, Matignon, a few minutes later. “One can't be prime minister when the conditions haven't been met,” he explained, attacking the “partisan appetites” that had stopped him from “charting a course”. “The parties continue to behave as if they all had an absolute majority,” declared Sébastien Lecornu. He regretted that everyone had “pretended not to see” the “deep change” that his decision to renounce the use of Article 49-3 of the French Constitution – a constitutional measure which allows legislation to pass without a vote and the regular use of which has angered opposition parties - was meant to represent.
If the dissolution of the National Assembly by President Macron June 9th 2024 was an earthquake, the aftershock now shaking the political scene is the strongest in fifteen months – perhaps stronger even than the original shockwave. A final circle of diehard Macron supporters had continued to believe that stability could be built around a coalition of the centrist presidential camp and the right-wing party Les Républicains (LR). But the resignation of Sébastien Lecornu, following those of his predecessors as prime minister François Bayrou and Michel Barnier, has plunged French political life into a new phase.
The Élysée's clumsy schemes have now run their course, and the president’s camp is discovering a dizzying truth: it is no longer possible to impose ever more minority governments without paralysing public life and undermining the country's institutions. Personal rivalries and pointless plot twists have only hastened a long-foreseen breakdown, despite the stubbornness that prevails at the upper reaches of the state.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
That stubbornness was once again apparent on Monday evening when, to general surprise, Emmanuel Macron announced that he had entrusted Sébastien Lecornu with the “responsibility of conducting, by Wednesday evening, final talks to define a platform for action and stability for the country”. This was a bizarre attempt by the head of state to save Lecornu, through a move that was hatched over the course of Monday at the highest levels of the state.
An hour earlier, veteran politician Bruno Le Maire had announced on X that he was giving up his post as outgoing minister of the armed forces. “I note that my decision has provoked incomprehensible, false and disproportionate reactions among some people,” wrote the former Les Républicains (LR) MP on X, arguing that “no individual case should block the proper running of the country”.
As a result, Bruno Le Maire said he had “proposed to the President of the Republic that he remove me from the government without delay and transfer my responsibilities as minister of the armed forces to the prime minister”. This was an unprecedented constitutional acrobatic move supposed, in the view of the former minister, to unblock the situation and bring LR back to the negotiating table.
Then at 6pm Sébastien Lecornu declared on X: “I will tell the head of state on Wednesday evening whether this is possible or not, so that he can draw all the necessary conclusions.” President Macron himself indicated later that he would “take responsibility" if those talks failed.
The task looks a daunting one, given the depth of the rift between outgoing interior minister Bruno Retailleau and the president’s entourage. For Retailleau, leader of the rightwing Les Républicains (LR), had been the immediate trigger for the breakdown of the new government. Already weakened, the structure built by Sébastien Lecornu collapsed the moment the LR boss wrote on X that the government line-up did not “reflect the promised change”. Speaking on TF1 television, the outgoing interior minister said - as Mediapart had written on Sunday - that Lecornu’s concealment of the return of former economy minister Bruno Le Maire to government had prompted his reaction.
A political void
“I met with the prime minister for an hour and a half, a few minutes before the government line-up was announced,” Retailleau said. “He hid from me that Bruno Le Maire would be appointed. He never told me.” This was enough to feed a “breach of trust” between the two men, according to Bruno Retailleau. “When people hide things from me, I can't make a commitment. The values of political life should be the values of real life,” he said.
More broadly, the outgoing interior minister criticised the continuity of the Lecornu ministerial team with past governments, even though he had himself called for rightwing LR ministers to be retained. “We’re promised a change and end up with the same old faces,” he said, citing Bruno Le Maire, who he said “symbolises” the explosion of the country's public debt. “It shows a kind of detachment,” he added, judging at the time that the fall of the government was “a matter of days”. In fact it was just a matter of hours.
Having reached the end of the road, the presidential camp is now staring into a political void. The void of a dissolution of the National Assembly and thus fresh parliamentary elections, or that of the resignation of Emmanuel Macron himself, something that figures on the Left, Right, and far-right are now openly calling for. All the parties have entered “crisis mode”, and have devoted Monday to emergency meetings.
Dissolution of the National Assembly on everyone’s mind
The president has himself remains publicly silent so far. Filmed in a striking image shown by news channel BFMTV, walking along the banks of the Seine after Lecornu's resignation, Emmanuel Macron has withdrawn into the same silence as his entourage.
“He must resign or go following a vote of the assemblies,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the radical-left La France insoumise (LFI) at a midday press conference, referring to the National Assembly and the Senate. The word dissolution is on everyone’s lips, including within the government, where several ministers and advisers contacted by Mediapart see it as “inevitable”. One source within the executive, however, believes that the head of state will “try to buy time”.
Some of his supporters are urging President Macron to attempt the formation of a fourth government with the same National Assembly but backed by a different coalition. “To those who still think one could govern while ignoring the Left, I say: you are wrong,” wrote the outgoing minister for ecological transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, a member of Macron's own Renaissance party, on X.
Without stating his position clearly, thus leaving an element of doubt over whether he favours an alliance with the far-right, Bruno Retailleau declared: “I think there are other ways before a return to the ballot box. It’s just that they're not down to me. The key is the President of the Republic.” On the other side of the political field, Boris Vallaud, president of the Socialist group at the Assembly, stated: “I know only one master, one guide, and that is universal suffrage.”
The president's approach has meanwhile dismayed even those within his own political party, Renaissance. “Like many French people, I no longer understand the decisions of the President of the Republic: there was the dissolution and since then there have been decisions that give the impression of a kind of obstinacy to keep control,” Gabriel Attal, a former prime minister under Macron and the party's secretary-general, told TFI.
In 1924, mired in crisis, Alexandre Millerand eventually resigned. In his “letter to the nation”, the outgoing head of state explained: “I yield only after having exhausted every lawful means within my power.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter