France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has resigned, less than a day after his cabinet was unveiled.
“The conditions were not fulfilled for me to carry on as prime minister,” Lecornu said on Monday morning, and criticised the unwillingness by political parties to reach compromises.
The Elysée palace made the announcement after Lecornu met President Emmanuel Macron for an hour on Monday morning.
The shock move comes only 26 days Lecornu was appointed prime minister following the collapse of the previous government of François Bayrou.
Parties across the board in the National Assembly had fiercely criticised the composition of Lecornu’s cabinet, which was largely unchanged from Bayrou’s, and threatened to vote it down.
Several parties are now clamouring for early elections, with some calling for Macron to resign too – although he has always said he will not stand down before his term ends in 2027.
“The only wise thing to do now is to hold elections,” said Marine Le Pen of the far right National Rally (RN).
“The joke’s gone on long enough. French people are fed up. Macron has put the country in an extremely difficult position,” she added.
Lecornu – the former armed forces minister and a Macron loyalist – was France’s fifth prime minister in under two years.
In his brief speech outside Hôtel de Matignon, the prime minister’s residence which he only occupied for less than a month, Lecornu sharply criticised the “partisan appetites” of political factions, who he said “are all behaving as if they had an absolute majority.”
“I was ready for compromise but all parties wanted the other party to adopt their programmes in their entirety,” he said.
“It wouldn’t need much for this to work,” he added, saying however that parties needed to be more humble and “to cast some egos aside”.
French politics has been highly unstable since July 2024, when snap parliamentary elections resulted in a hung parliament.
This has made it difficult for any prime minister to garner the necessary support to pass any bills.
Bayrou’s government was voted down in September after parliament refused to back his austerity budget, which aimed to slash government spending by €44bn ($51bn; £38bn).
France’s deficit reached 5.8% of GDP in 2024 and its national debt is 114% of GDP. That is the third highest public debt in the eurozone after Greece and Italy, and equivalent to almost €50,000 per French citizen.
Stocks fell sharply in the Paris exchange after the news of Lecornu’s resignation broke on Monday morning.
