French deputies will vote starting at 4pm on a motion of censure which, barring last-minute unforeseen events, will bring down the government led by the prime minister conservator Michel Barnier in charge alone three months leaving the country on the brink of a new political crisis.
The French National Assembly has two motions of censure on its agenda: one presented by the deputies of the left-wing coalition New Popular Front (La France Insoumise, the socialists, the greens and the communists) and the other by the far-right Marine Le Pen, the National Rally (RN).
If there are no big surprises, the first to be voted for – the progressives – will be successful, given that Le Pen herself has declared that her deputies will support him. The current one parliamentary chamber is the most fragmented of recent decades, with three large blocs almost equally divided: the left, the Macronist center and the far right of Le Pen and her allies. None of these have a majority on their own.
The motion against Barnier’s cabinet is the result of the rejection of the 2025 general budget, supported only by the Macronists and the minority of the classical right that Barnier himself represents (the Republicans).
If the motion is successful, France will not vote for an alternative candidate, as happens in other European democracies. It is therefore up to President Macron to find a solution, knowing that, constitutionally, he cannot call new legislative elections until mid-2025. According to the press, Macron is considering two names that could have Le Pen’s implicit approval: that of current Defense Minister, Sebastian Lecornu, and that of the veteran centrist Francois Bayrou. However, from Saudi Arabia, the president said he was still confident the motion would ultimately fail and responded to calls for his resignation.
“This (resignation) is fictitious politics, it doesn’t make any sense,” he said during a conversation with French journalists in Riyadh. Jean-Luc Melenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), the third party in the National Assembly, is the force that explicitly calls for the resignation of Macron, who he considers guilty of the country’s political instability since he dissolved the legislature on June 9 and called an early parliamentary session that led to an assembly divided into three blocs and not very inclined towards agreements.