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Reuters
French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu faces a crucial test on Tuesday as the country's divided parliament prepares to vote on a 2026 budget bill.
If Lecornu fails to win a majority in the National Assembly for his social security budget, it bodes ill for the main budget bill which follows and which needs to be voted through by the end of the year.
It could also pose awkward questions over his authority to lead the government, though for the moment there is little expectation he will resign.
Appointed in September by President Emmanuel Macron, Lecornu has devoted himself exclusively to the uphill task of guiding 2026 budget legislation through the two chambers of parliament.
Since snap elections called by Macron in June 2024, the more powerful chamber, the National Assembly, has been split into three roughly equal blocs – centre, left, and far-right -- none of which is capable of commanding a majority.
Lecornu is Macron's fourth prime minister since then – the two previous incumbents Michel Barnier and François Bayrou having both been forced to resign after trying to rein in France's burgeoning debt. Barnier stepped down exactly a year ago after failing to push through the 2025 social security budget.
In the French system, there are two budgetary laws – one that raises and allocates money in the social security system, including hospitals and pensions; and the principal one that covers everything else, from defence to education. For years both have run on massive deficits.
Widely acknowledged for his discretion and diligence, Lecornu needs to convince enough deputies from the 11 different parliamentary groups that failure to vote the budgets through will plunge the country into even deeper financial gloom.
His main target has been the Socialist Party (PS) with around 70 MPs, many of whom are uncomfortable in their erstwhile electoral alliance with the far-left France Unbowed party.
In major concessions to the PS, Lecornu promised to suspend Macron's key second-term reform increasing to 64 the statutory age of retirement, and also to refrain from using a government power (known as 49-3) to force through the budget laws without a vote.
Socialist leaders Olivier Faure and Boris Vallaud have praised Lecornu's sense of compromise and are urging their deputies to support the social security budget.
But by giving ground to the centre-left, Lecornu has potentially lost support in his own camp on the centre-right, where important figures such as former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe say the bill will do little to redress the country's fast deteriorating public accounts.
Tuesday's vote was set to be very close, with the far-right National Rally and its allies (140 or so deputies) and the far-left France Unbowed (71) both set to vote no, along with the Ecologists and Communists (55 altogether). A majority in a full chamber is 288 MPs.
Lecornu is hoping to win over some individuals on the left with promises of more spending on hospitals. And he hopes opposition from within his own camp will be limited to abstentions rather than votes against.
If the social security budget fails to pass, it would almost certainly mean that the main budget for 2026 would also fail. As a result the government would probably introduce a special law to allow the state administration to continue functioning from 1 January using 2025 allocations.
Though a personal blow to Lecornu and his low-key political methods, few expect that he would immediately step down in such a scenario.
By voluntarily abandoning the use of the 49-3, the prime minister in effect gave MPs the chance to amend the government's budget text to their hearts' content. If the text then fails, he calculates, the blame will fall primarily on heads in parliament.
