France faces deep political turmoil as minority governments battle to reduce the deficit and reform pensions.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu delivers a speech during the debate before the vote on two motions of censure against the French government filed by deputies of France Insoumise (France Unbowed – LFI) and Rassemblement National (Rassemblement National – RN), two days after the French Prime Minister’s general policy speech, during a public session at the National Assembly in Paris, France, October 16, 2025. REUTERS
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu survived two no-confidence votes in Parliament on Thursday, winning crucial support from the Socialist Party with his promise to suspend President Emmanuel Macron’s contested pension reform.
The two motions presented by the far-left France Insoumise party and the far-right National Rally (RN) obtained only 271 and 144 votes respectively, far from the 289 votes needed to overthrow Lecornu’s government.
Lecornu’s proposal to suspend pension reform until after the 2027 presidential election helped sway the socialists, giving the government a lifeline in a deeply fragmented National Assembly.
Despite the reprieve, the motions highlighted the fragility of the Macron administration midway through its final term.
“A majority cobbled together by bargaining managed today to save its positions, to the detriment of the national interest,” wrote the president of the RN party, Jordan Bardella, on X.
The French bond market remained stable after these consecutive votes, with the government’s victory widely expected by investors.
Lecornu faces tough budget negotiations
By putting pension reform on the chopping block, Lecornu threatens to kill one of Macron’s key economic legacies at a time when France’s public finances are in a perilous state, leaving the president with few domestic achievements after eight years in office.
There are 265 MPs in parliament from parties who have said they would vote to overthrow Lecornu, and only a handful of rebels from other groups have joined their cause.
If Lecornu had lost either vote, he and his ministers would have had to resign immediately, and Macron would have come under enormous pressure to call early legislative elections, plunging France even deeper into crisis.
But despite the outcome of Thursday’s votes, Lecornu still faces weeks of arduous negotiations in Parliament to adopt a slimmed-down 2026 budget, during which it could be overturned at any time.
“The French need to know that we are doing all this work… to give them a budget, because it is fundamental for the future of our country,” said Yael Braun-Pivet, president of the National Assembly and a Macron ally.
“I am happy to see that today there is a majority in the National Assembly which operates in this spirit: work, the search for compromise, the best possible effort,” she added.
After obtaining the pension concession, the Socialists decided on Wednesday to include a tax on billionaires in the 2026 budget, highlighting how weak Lecornu’s hand is in the negotiations.
Political Kryptonite
France is in the midst of its worst political crisis in decades as a succession of minority governments seek to impose deficit-cutting budgets through a truculent legislature divided into three distinct ideological blocs.
Reform of France’s generous pension system has been political kryptonite since Socialist President François Mitterrand lowered the retirement age from 65 to 60 in 1982.
In France, the average effective retirement age is only 60.7 years, compared to an OECD average of 64.4 years.
Macron’s reform raised the legal retirement age by two years, to 64 by 2030. Even if this only aligns French policy with that of other European Union member states, it destroys a social benefit dear to the left.
