France - Republic at an Impasse
France - Republic at an Impasse
France’s political center of gravity has shifted from the Elysée Palace to a constantly contested National Assembly, and the country is feeling the strain. The snap legislative election of June–July 2024 broke the spell of presidential dominance that defined the Fifth Republic, returning a fragmented lower house with three roughly equal poles: a left coalition, President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc, and the far right. On paper, the arithmetic promised stalemate. In practice, it delivered a conveyor belt of short-lived governments, lurching budget battles, and an argument about whether the institutions still fit the country they are meant to serve. The system is holding—for now—but only by leaning on caretaker arrangements and last-ditch deals that substitute improvisation for strategy. The risk is not collapse so much as drift.
The numbers matter because they dictate everything else. The New Popular Front (NFP) emerged first in seats after the 2024 vote, the presidential center Ensemble finished second, and the National Rally (RN) placed third, with Les Républicains (LR) shrunken but sometimes pivotal. No grouping approached the 289-seat majority. The result locked in a hung Assembly, empowered tactical withdrawals and ad hoc barricades against the far right, and made programmatic governing close to impossible. Those facts set the stage for the instability of 2024–2025 and remain the fundamental constraint on any exit from the current impasse.
Every government since then has been built on sand. After the election, a center-right experiment under Michel Barnier fell to a cross-ideological no-confidence vote in December 2024, the first such toppling since 1962. François Bayrou then tried to knit a centrist minority into durability, surviving early censure attempts and forcing through a long-delayed 2025 budget, only to be ousted in September 2025 as debt consolidation collided with political fatigue. His successor, Sébastien Lecornu, assembled a cabinet on October 5—but resigned within days amid vows by opponents to bring him down at the first opportunity. In a telling symbol of how improvisational government has become, Macron asked Lecornu to keep brokering talks as a caretaker, even after the resignation.
What began as a parliamentary puzzle has metastasized into a crisis of authority. The Elysée still wields constitutional tools, but the political capital to use them has eroded. Former allies now pressure the president publicly: Édouard Philippe urged an end to the stalemate, Gabriel Attal offered sharp critiques, and figures across the spectrum have floated resignation, renewed dissolution of the Assembly, or a prime minister from outside Macron’s camp as the only ways forward. The fact that such ideas are being argued in the open tells us how far the center has frayed. For the moment, Macron says he intends to finish his term in 2027, yet he has left the door ajar to another dissolution if talks fail. The risk is a second snap election that reproduces the same arithmetic.
The economics of the stalemate are becoming the politics of the stalemate. Credit ratings pressure, tight deadlines for budgets, and the return of EU fiscal rules have narrowed room for maneuver. A downgrade in 2024 and a darker outlook in early 2025 concentrated minds in Paris. A deficit still planned around the mid-5s percent of GDP has left France under the European Union’s excessive deficit procedure, with heightened scrutiny from markets and institutions. The budget calendar, already fragile last winter, is again on the line after Lecornu’s departure; the possibility of operating on provisional financing or emergency mechanisms is not abstract. When central bankers and rating agencies appear as supporting characters in the daily political drama, it is because their constraints now define the plot.
In this climate, every policy becomes a confidence vote by other means. Pensions are the flashpoint. The 2023 reform that raised the legal retirement age to 64 was passed over furious opposition and remains a mobilizing grievance. As the government canvasses for a budget compromise, senior figures have floated suspending or revisiting elements of the reform to lure the left into an abstention. Finance officials warn that any climbdown would be costly and could blow holes in the consolidation plan. The politics cut the other way too: the right argues that backtracking would reward obstruction and risk market credibility. It is a quintessential Fifth Republic dilemma—balancing social peace with fiscal arithmetic in a system designed to privilege executive action, now blocked by a chamber that refuses to be led.
The partisan dynamics are as fluid as the institutional ones. The RN has adopted a strategy of standing aside from budget horse-trading while insisting on new elections. That posture denies the governing center the votes it needs, keeps the far right out of the messy compromises that might tarnish its anti-system brand, and reinforces its claim to be the only coherent alternative. With Marine Le Pen under a judicial cloud and, for now, barred from a presidential bid, Jordan Bardella has become the face of succession planning for 2027. That dual track—electoral patience, institutional sabotage—has served the party well in a chamber calibrated to punish governing blocs that cannot count.
On the left, the NFP’s internal contradictions are visible. Socialists and Greens favor pragmatic deals on the budget and some reforms, while France Unbowed thrives on maximal confrontation and the symbolism of bringing governments down. The center’s calculus has been to peel off moderates where possible and accept stalemate where not. Yet the risk for the left is that maximalism hands the far right the language of responsibility—particularly when social policy concessions are on the table and the arithmetic for a progressive program remains out of reach. In this contest, abstention can be as consequential as a yes vote.
The center-right LR is a shadow of its former self and still working through the trauma of 2024, when splinters flirted with the RN and the party vacillated between kingmaker ambitions and ideological red lines. In a hung Assembly, LR’s handfuls of deputies can be decisive in committee and on specific titles of the budget, but their power is negative more often than positive. The party’s longer-term bet is that a law-and-order, pro-enterprise profile will look like stability by 2027 if the far right appears risky and the left too divided. The danger is irrelevance if the RN continues to monopolize opposition votes in working-class and peri-urban France while the Macronists soak up the metropolitan center.
Europe is not a bystander, and not only because of fiscal rules. The war in Ukraine, energy strategy, and industrial policy have all been recast as questions of European capacity. France has led in defense initiatives and nuclear revival rhetoric, but delivery requires budgets, and budgets require votes. The revolving door at Matignon reduces the credibility of French leadership in Brussels and feeds an impression—unfair but widespread—that Paris can no longer meet the responsibilities it claims. When ECB officials hope out loud that France will submit a budget on time, it is a reputational reminder as much as a technical one.
Underneath the constitutional engineering and the budget spreadsheets sits a social question we cannot ignore. The pension reform crystallized feelings of unfairness, but the deeper anxiety is that living standards are squeezed while Paris politics appears self-absorbed. Farmers, teachers, health workers, and police unions have all taken their arguments to the street or the airwaves in recent years. In this atmosphere, procedural hardball—ruling by decree where possible, or forcing through a budget with constitutional instruments—looks less like firmness and more like a system that cannot build consent. Our assessment is that the next stable government in France will be the first one that demonstrates it can negotiate without humiliating its partners.
Publicly known facts now coexist with serious rumors that circulate in the political press and among senior aides, and these rumors have become part of the bargaining itself. The most persistent is the possibility of a “government of experts” to pass a budget and a handful of reforms before 2027. Another, raised even by some within the governing camp, is that a prime minister could be named from outside Macron’s political family to broker a confidence-and-supply pact with parts of the left or right. On the other side, the RN is betting that refusing to legitimize such engineering hastens a new dissolution. These scenarios are not idle chatter; they are explicitly referenced by key players and opponents, which is why they shape expectations in the Assembly and in markets.
We should be sober about why the cabinet churn has accelerated. The Barnier experiment failed because it rested on a minority uncomfortable with openly relying on RN neutrality. The Bayrou interlude survived long enough to shepherd a budget but died on the altar of deficit control without consensus. Lecornu’s lightning resignation underscored that personnel cannot offset arithmetic, and that an incoming premier who lacks guaranteed tolerance from at least one opposition pole will be forced into a short caretaker horizon from day one. In each case, personalities mattered less than the system’s refusal to reward compromise.
The presidency remains the fulcrum in any solution, yet its authority is at once constitutionally immense and politically constrained. Our view is that Macron’s best leverage lies not in threatening a new dissolution—which risks reproducing the deadlock—but in using the budget to build a minimum-viable coalition on fiscal policy, then broadening outward into two or three cross-party priorities with visible social benefit. That would mean accepting partial ownership by opponents, an unpalatable shift for a movement built on disruption and centralization. It would also mean publishing calendar-bound trade-offs: what the state will not do, as much as what it will. The irony is that such an approach would look more like parliamentary culture under the Third or Fourth Republics than like Gaullist voluntarism.
If fiscal credibility is the currency of stability, Paris has to reckon with the long shadow of the ratings agencies. Markets can tolerate noise if they trust the numbers. After the 2024 downgrade, France’s risk premium widened modestly; after the 2025 turbulence, another downgrade and a darker outlook followed. This is not 2011–2012, and France’s debt remains highly marketable. But the longer the impasse drags on, the tighter the margins for error in 2026 become, especially if growth undershoots. The nightmare is not a bond strike; it is a slow bleed that narrows options for whatever government follows.
Elections haunt the edges of every conversation. Pollsters and insiders will tell us that a fresh vote would likely return another split Assembly. That prediction is as much sociology as statistics: the three blocs are entrenched in distinct geographies and social profiles that do not swing easily. The far right has consolidated peri-urban and de-industrialized belts; the left dominates large cities’ younger cores and public-sector clusters; the center holds professionals in metropolitan regions who fear both extremes. A dissolution without a new social contract among these blocs is likely to reshuffle faces, not majorities. Even some of the president’s allies now concede the point while calling for a reset anyway.
The 2027 presidential race already radiates backward into today’s choices. With Le Pen’s legal uncertainty and Bardella’s ambitions, with center figures such as Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal testing their distance from the Elysée, and with the left split between pragmatists and tribunes, every vote in the Assembly doubles as a primary skirmish. That feedback loop is toxic for coalition-making: concessions today can be turned into attack lines tomorrow. A credible path to stability would therefore require a truce among would-be presidential contenders, at least on the budget and one structural reform. We do not see that truce yet.
Against this backdrop, what are the plausible outcomes over the next twelve months? We see four.
Cohabitation without dissolution. The president nominates a prime minister acceptable to a chunk of the left, perhaps via a programmatic agreement that suspends parts of the pension reform, tightens targeted spending, and advances a social policy flagship dear to Socialists and Greens. The far left continues to oppose, the RN refuses to engage, but the new premier survives confidence by securing abstentions. Budget titles pass with negotiated amendments; the Elysée keeps defense and foreign policy primacy. This would test the Fifth Republic’s elasticities while keeping institutional continuity. The price would be permanent tactical vulnerability inside the majority and accusations of betrayal from both the center and the radical left. The upside is that it could stabilize the calendar to 2027.
Snap elections that repeat the stalemate. Pressure from allies, street-level discontent, and parliamentary attrition tip the Elysée toward a second dissolution. The fresh vote—held under similar social alignments—returns another hung Assembly. The RN grows but still lacks a majority; the left holds; the center shrinks but remains pivotal. The immediate effect is not clarity but a deeper crisis of confidence, as voters conclude that the system cannot translate preferences into governance. Markets react nervously; European partners turn up the volume on fiscal compliance; the presidency weakens further. This scenario is easy to visualize because so many actors are already gaming it, but it solves little.
A technocratic interlude. Unable to secure a political pact, the president appoints a premier with administrative gravitas and no clear partisan anchor to pass a constrained budget, execute deficit-reduction commitments, and manage EU files. Parties grant tacit tolerance through abstention in exchange for narrow policy concessions and a sunset clause. This idea has been whispered around Paris for months. Its appeal is that it lowers the temperature; its flaw is that it treats politics like a technical problem and would be attacked as undemocratic. It could buy time, but only if the parties agree to treat that time as a bridge to a new bargain rather than as a campaign season in disguise.
A controlled rupture inside the center. Under sustained pressure, the Elysée opts for an internal reset: a new premier from beyond the inner circle, a public admission that the 2024 dissolution backfired, and a package of institutional and social measures pitched as “reconciliation.” This is the scenario in which the president keeps his term but cedes more day-to-day initiative to Matignon and to a cross-party steering group on fiscal policy. It would require Macron’s allies to accept a degree of de-Macronization ahead of 2027—painful but not impossible if the alternative is marginalization. The cost is identity; the benefit is governability. Early signals from former allies suggest they would consider it if it ends the current spiral.
As we weigh these paths, our working assumption is that France will inch toward a hybrid of the first and the third: a premier with enough political color to negotiate abstentions on the left but enough technocratic credibility to reassure markets and Brussels. That is not a bold vision, but boldness is scarce commodity in a hung Assembly. The debates about pensions and public services will not disappear; they will be managed through a sequence of partial compromises that look less coherent than they feel on the ground. If that seems unsatisfying, it is because the Fifth Republic was built to avoid exactly this style of politics, and yet the electorate has chosen a chamber that forces it.
None of this means that the situation is ungovernable. France is still delivering on core functions, and crisis rhetoric often outruns reality. But the current political cycle has stripped away illusions about executive omnipotence. It has also revealed how brittle the institutional balance becomes when the president’s party cannot command even a negative majority to block censure. The country is being nudged toward a parliamentary culture without the customary parliamentary tools: formal coalitions, confidence-and-supply, and a clear norm of compromise. We should expect the next year to be a tutorial in learning those tools, whether or not anyone is ready to name them.
Our view is that stability will come not from a single appointment or an elegant constitutional maneuver, but from a credible budget anchored in explicit trade-offs and backed by a realistic truce among adversaries who agree to disagree until 2027. If France can get there, the headlines will cool, the spread will narrow, and the room to argue about long-term direction—climate, competitiveness, social protection—will re-open. If it cannot, the country will drift toward a permanent campaign that leaves whoever inherits the Elysée two years from now with fewer options than the office was designed to provide. The Fifth Republic is not dying; it is asking to be used differently.
In the end, the question hanging over Paris is brutally simple: can a political class that has specialized in winning second rounds learn to govern without one?
