By Elizabeth Pineau and Gabriel Stargardter
PARIS (Reuters) – French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu survived the first of two no-confidence votes in parliament on Thursday, after winning crucial backing from the Socialist Party thanks to his pledge to suspend President Emmanuel Macron’s contested pension reform.
The motion presented by the hard-left France Unbowed party secured 271 votes, well short of the 289 votes needed to bring down Lecornu’s week-old government.
A second vote, tabled by the far-right National Rally (RN), is expected within the hour and looks certain to be defeated.
Lecornu’s offer to mothball the pensions reform until after the 2027 presidential election helped sway the Socialists, giving the government a lifeline in the deeply fragmented National Assembly.
Despite the reprieve, the vote has underscored the fragility of Macron’s administration midway through his final term.
“A majority cobbled together through horse-trading managed today to save their positions, at the expense of the national interest,” RN party president Jordan Bardella wrote on X.
The French bond market remained steady after the vote, with the government victory widely expected by investors.
LECORNU FACES ARDUOUS BUDGET NEGOTIATIONS
By putting the pension reform on the chopping block, Lecornu threatens to kill off one of Macron’s main economic legacies at a time when France’s public finances are in a perilous state, leaving the president with little in the way of domestic achievements after eight years in office.
There are 265 lawmakers in parliament from parties that said they would vote to topple Lecornu. While some politicians from other groups indicated they would back the no-confidence motions, they were not enough to sway the first vote.
If Lecornu were defeated in either vote, he and his ministers would have to immediately resign, and Macron would come under huge pressure to call a snap parliamentary election, plunging France back into crisis.
But even if, as expected, he also survives the second vote on Thursday, Lecornu still faces weeks of arduous negotiations in parliament over passing a slimmed-down 2026 budget during which he could be toppled at any point.
“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, the president of the National Assembly and an ally of Macron.
“I am pleased to see that today there is a majority in the National Assembly that is operating in this spirit: work, the search for compromise, the best possible effort,” she added.
After winning the pensions concession, the Socialists on Wednesday set their sights on including a tax on billionaires in the 2026 budget, underlining just 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 push deficit-reducing budgets through a truculent legislature split into three distinct ideological blocs.
Reforming France’s generous pension system has been political kryptonite ever since Socialist President Francois Mitterrand cut the retirement age to 60 from 65 in 1982.
In France, the average effective retirement age is just 60.7, compared to the OECD average of 64.4.
Macron’s reform raised the statutory retirement age by two years to 64 by 2030. Although that only brings French policy into line with other European Union member states, it chips away at a cherished social benefit beloved by the left.
(Additional reporting by Alessandro Parodi; Writing by Gabriel Stargardter and Crispian Balmer; Editing by Sharon Singleton and Gareth Jones)
