French PM Bayrou calls risky confidence vote on budget

Brussels – François Bayrou is at it again. The French prime minister has announced a vote of confidence on the 2026 budget plan next month, with which he would like to bring the state deficit back below 5 percent of GDP. But he seems poised to lose it, given the opposition of a considerable part of the political forces. An eventual government collapse would further aggravate the worst political crisis in the country’s modern history. 

The unexpected news came yesterday evening (25 August). The Palais Matignon occupant, the leader of the centrist Mouvement Démocrate (MoDem) party and close ally of President Emmanuel Macron, announced an extraordinary session of the Assemblée Nationale for 8 September, a couple of weeks before the natural resumption of parliamentary work, to submit to the deputies the budget plan for 2026 and seek a vote of confidence from the deputies.

“When your house is on fire or when you are about to sink, you have to recognize the situation,” said Monsieur le Premier Ministre, noting the very narrow road ahead and warning that “our freedom is at stake.” His proposal is a €43.8 billion austerity plan between spending cuts and new taxes, aimed at reducing Paris’s monstrous deficit from 5.8 percent to 4.6 percent of GDP (the European limit is 3 percent).

To finance such a budget, Bayrou even hinted at the suppression of two public holidays (Easter Monday and 8 May, commemorating the end of the Second World War), triggering strong protests both in Parliament and in the streets. The Prime Minister is well aware of how unpopular his draft budget is and how real the risk of crashing his minority executive is. Still, he apparently decided to play preemptively rather than wait for a no-confidence motion that would have inevitably arrived in the coming weeks. 

Three parliamentary groups – the radical left of La France Insoumise (LFI), the environmentalists of Les Écologistes (EELV), and the far-right of the Rassemblement National (RN) – have already announced that they will not support him. Overall, they represent at least 220 seats out of the total 577 in the hemicycle.

Now, all eyes are on the moves of the Parti Socialiste (PS) of Olivier Faure, whose 66 elected members will be decisive in deciding the fate of the prime minister: abstention will not be enough to keep him in power. However, the Social Democratic leader is said to have already ruled out this option following the failure of negotiations with the centrists on the controversial pension reform.

Bayrou’s predecessor, the neo-Gaullist Michel Barnier, had also fallen over the budget law. The former EU Brexit negotiator was ousted in December after just three months in office (marking the negative record of the Fifth Republic), brought down by the opposition parties over a 60 billion “blood and tears” budget. In January, Bayrou managed to avoid a censure motion advanced by the LFI leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon,
saved by the votes of socialists and Le Penists. 

Should the premier fail to repeat that success, he will be the third government to be unseated in a year. France is experiencing its worst political-institutional crisis in modern history, following Macron’s call for early elections in June 2024 to counter the extreme right. That trick, however, backfired, handing the relative majority to the united front of the left (the Nouveau Front Populaire) and producing the most balkanised Assembly ever seen in the last 67 years.