France’s Prime Minister Michel Barnier is set to be ousted after his social security budget failed to receive backing from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen said on Tuesday that supporting a no-confidence vote to remove Michel Barnier as prime minister is the only way under the country’s constitution to protect the public from a “dangerous, unjust and punitive budget”.
Barnier is facing a no-confidence motion on Wednesday evening which is almost certain to topple his fragile coalition government, and cause alarm across the eurozone.
France’s PM on Monday invoked a rarely used constitutional mechanism — Article 49.3 — to force through his contentious social security budget without a parliamentary vote, having failed to win the backing of Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) after a political standoff.
Barnier had made concessions at the eleventh hour on the social security bill — such as scrapping electricity price hikes and reducing healthcare coverage for undocumented migrants — in a bid to appease the RN, which props up his minority government as the single largest party in the National Assembly.
Yet Le Pen and other opposition leaders said Barnier’s compromises were not sufficient to address their concerns and called for a no-confidence vote after the prime minister used the provision of the law to push through the proposed budget. It would cut €40 billion in public spending and raise taxes by €20 billion.
Writing on X on Tuesday, Le Pen said the no-confidence motion is the “only way that the constitution offers to protect the French from a dangerous, unjust and punitive budget”.
Both the RN and a left-wing coalition have tabled no-confidence votes against Barnier. Le Pen has confirmed that her party would vote for the leftist alliance’s motion, which will have enough support from the left and the far right combined to oust the prime minister.
It would be the first time in more than six decades that a French government has been toppled by such a vote and make Barnier the country’s shortest-serving PM since 1958.
Barnier was appointed by French President Emmanuel Macron in September to navigate an impasse in the fractured National Assembly and tackle the nation’s soaring deficit.
His draft budget aimed to cut the fiscal deficit from an estimated 6% of its GDP to 5% next year, with Barnier warning last week that a failure to approve the bill would lead to “a big storm and very serious turbulence on the financial markets”.
The standoff over the budget has hammered France’s stock market in recent weeks and briefly pushed Paris’ borrowing costs above Greece’s for the first time on record.
If the no-confidence vote passes as expected, Macron could ask Barnier to continue in a caretaker role as he looks for a new prime minister, which would likely happen in 2025.
Regarding the social security bill, there is a 20 December deadline for it to be adopted by parliament, otherwise the all-but-certain interim government could use a special emergency law to roll over this year’s budget for a few months into the new year.
