The French prime minister, François Bayrou, said goodbye in mid -July with the controversial announcement of very unpopular measures in the 2026 budgets. In the same line, this Monday has released the political course with another unexpected announcement: it will undergo a vote of confidence in the French assembly on September 8. He will do it in an extraordinary session on public finances in which “the urgency” of his cuts will be voted: “If there is no majority, the government will fall,” Bayrou warned. Both Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left and Marine Le Pen’s ultra-right have already announced their opposite vote.
“We are in a worrying and decisive moment” in which “a clarification is needed: is there or not a national urgency to rebalance public accounts and escape the curse of indebtedness? This is the central issue,” said Bayrou, which thus tries to postpone the budgetary debate. “The discussion about the measures is something else, another different stage,” he insisted.
Bayrou faced this autumn the threat of censorship to his government, because he has no majority in the assembly and the opposition has already said that he will not support the budgets as they presented. Now the race begins, not to convince the cuts, but to get support to, at least, start discussing the package: “Every vote of each deputy counts,” he requested.
The announcement is risky: the left has said that he will not give him his trust and the extreme right -wing party national regrouping, by Marine Le Pen, has also reiterated that he will not vote in favor. “National regrouping will never vote in favor of confidence in a government whose decisions cause suffering to the French people,” said X Jordan Bardella, president of the party in his account.
Bayrou has used the same solemn tone he used in July, when he presented the budgets: “Debt dependence has become chronicle” and is “an immediate danger to France,” he warned. To illustrate, he explained that, for 20 years, “every hour of every day and every night the debt has increased by 12 million.”
What the minister proposes is to vote “in the first place, whether or not we agree that we have a vital urgency problem”, which is the debt. Then, “in a second half,” the measures to carry it out will be discussed. “Our freedom and our sovereignty is at stake,” insisted the prime minister, who has put an example to countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal, where in some cases “pensions were reduced by 30%” in the 2008 crisis.
The objective of Bayrou’s scissors is to redirect the bulky debt of the country, which of euros, and the deficit today of 5.4% of GDP. A figure far from 3% that marks Brussels.
The plan, presented in mid -July, suggests “a blank year” in which the expense will be frozen, with cuts of 44,000 million euros and 3,000 jobs from public officials. The most unpopular measure, that both the unions and the opposition consider a red line, is to suppress two holidays of the calendar: on Easter Monday and May 8, when the end of World War II is commemorated. On this measure, Bayrou has admitted that it is “negotiable.”
Bayrou met President Emmanuel Macron last Thursday in Brégançon, where the latter passes his summer vacations, to plan. The opposition had threatened to censor him before the debate of the budgets began, in mid -October: both the left, including the Socialists, and RN, who had so far refrained in presented against the Prime Minister in eight months.
There are already convened protests on the street. The first will be on Wednesday, September 10, when it has been called to block the country. It is at the initiative of the movement we block everything, which arose through social networks, but the leftist parties have advanced that they will be added.
The prime minister has spent all summer trying to defend his unpopular project and even where he has been publishing weekly videos to explain some of the measures of his controversial package.
The last time a vote of confidence was requested in France was in June 2024, when Macron dissolved the assembly and convened early legislative elections, which won the Le Pen match in the first round, and in the second the left block, leaving the assembly fragmented and plunging the country into the institutional chaos. That has the country since then.
