By Elizabeth Pineau and Mathieu Rosemain
PARIS (Reuters) -French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu met with President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday evening, ahead of a likely naming of a new cabinet before a Monday deadline to present a 2026 budget.
Lecornu was reappointed prime minister on Friday and has been working to quickly appoint key cabinet members before Monday’s budget deadline. BFM TV reported Macron wanted a government named before he left for Egypt late on Sunday to attend a meeting to finalise the war in Gaza.
Still, in a sign of the volatility gripping French politics, Lecornu said on Sunday he would not rule out resigning again if he felt he was unable to complete his mission to pass a budget.
“If the conditions were no longer met again, I’d leave,” he told La Tribune Dimanche. “I’m not going to just go along with whatever.”
Lecornu, whose second stint as the head of a weak minority government is likely to be no easier than his first, arrived at the Elysee palace on Sunday evening, according to a Reuters reporter present. Lecornu’s last cabinet lasted just 14 hours before he handed in his resignation, less than a week ago.
Lecornu must present a draft budget bill to cabinet and parliament on Monday, requiring key ministerial positions to be filled immediately amid France’s deepest political crisis in decades. Lecornu has vowed to tame France’s bulging deficit, and while conservatives want spending cuts, the left demands a billionaires’ tax and a repeal of Macron’s pension reform.
WILL THEY, WON’T THEY
Allied and rival parties wrestled all weekend over whether to join Lecornu’s new government, or vote to topple it.
The conservative LR party’s governing body said on Saturday that “the trust and conditions are not in place” to join Lecornu’s government, yet a majority of the party’s lower house members favour taking cabinet positions to influence the budget, according to Le Monde newspaper.
Centrist party UDI said it would support the new government but ruled out taking part in it, while Horizons, a close ally of Macron’s party in parliament, said it would not join a cabinet that backed suspending the pension reform.
These red lines clash directly with left-wing parties whose support Lecornu needs to survive.
Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure lamented an “endless day” following Lecornu’s reappointment and threatened to vote to topple the government unless the pension reform was suspended in an interview with La Tribune Dimanche.
PM MIGHT HAVE TO TURN TO EMERGENCY LEGISLATION
Lecornu signalled potential flexibility on this issue on Saturday, saying “all debates are possible as long as they are realistic” when asked about suspending the pension reform.
If he fails to secure parliamentary support, France would need emergency stop-gap legislation to authorise spending from January 1 until a full budget is adopted.
(Reporting by Mathieu Rosemain; Additional reporting by Elizabeth Pineau; Editing by Alex Richardson and Ros Russell)
