French government collapse: France President Emmanuel Macron to name new Prime Minister, replacing Francois Bayrou who resigns. Snap elections to be declared?

French President Emmanuel Macron will name a new prime minister "in the coming days," the presidential palace said on Monday, after France's parliament voted on Monday to bring down the government over its plans to tame the ballooning national debt. Francois Bayrou, who had called for a confidence vote, will tender his resignation Tuesday morning, the prime minister's office told Reuters.

French far-right three-time presidential candidate Marine Le Pen on Monday urged President Emmanuel Macron to call snap legislative elections in a bid to end months of political deadlock. Holding the polls is "not an option but an obligation" for Macron, Le Pen told the National Assembly ahead of a confidence vote in the government of Prime Minister Francois Bayrou which she predicted would bring about "the end of the agony of a phantom government".

Prime Minister Francois Bayrou, ejected from office after just nine months, is a veteran centrist appointed in December after persuading President Emmanuel Macron he was the right person to restore political stability to France.


The government of François Bayrou, a centrist prime minister who has been in office for just nine months, collapsed Monday in the latest sign of a France reduced to chronic political instability and an incapacity to confront its growing financial crisis.

The National Assembly, or lower house of parliament, voted overwhelmingly against Bayrou in a confidence motion he had called with the aim of setting out the gravity of France's ballooning debt and budget deficit, and the need to confront them by finding annual savings of at least $51 billion.

The vote was 364 against Bayrou's government and 194 in favor in the 577-seat lower house, a crushing defeat for the prime minister. Abstentions and absences accounted for the remaining lawmakers.

With the National Assembly divided into far-right, centrist and left-wing blocs, each large enough to create an impasse, France has been in a state of ominous drift since Macron called snap parliamentary elections in June 2024, a gesture as apparently capricious as Bayrou's and one that upended French politics.

France has become nearly ungovernable because the old alternation between moderate left and right has been replaced by the growing dominance of political extremes in a country with no tradition of compromise and coalition building of the kind found in Italy or Germany. A tripartite balance of power -- far left, center and far right -- has become a byword for inertia, as Bayrou, short on initiative and slow to negotiate, seemed to adopt a policy of drift.

Some of the political showdown Monday echoed turmoil from last year, when Michel Barnier, Bayrou's predecessor, fell to a no-confidence vote in December, raising fears that France would fail to pass a budget for 2025 and enter uncharted financial territory.

FAQs

Q1. Who is French President?
A1. French President Emmanuel Macron.

Q2. Who is French Prime Minister?
A2. The outgoing Prime Minister is François Bayrou.