France

France’s political class returned from summer recess this week facing a familiar and worsening problem: a National Assembly with no working majority, a 2027 budget that must somehow pass anyway, and a presidential race that, with less than eight months to go before voters head to the polls, is already reshaping how every major party approaches the fall legislative session. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who has spent months trying to hold together a government that lacks a stable parliamentary coalition, has made passing a 2027 budget his central priority for the fall, but he is doing so under a self-imposed constraint designed to keep his own political future out of the equation. “I am not a candidate in the presidential election,” Lecornu said, an explicit attempt to signal that his budget proposals are being shaped by fiscal necessity rather than positioning for 2027 — a distinction he hopes will make it easier to find votes from lawmakers who might otherwise view any prime ministerial initiative through the lens of the coming presidential contest. Lecornu’s team has described the budget measures under consideration as deliberately “reversible,” a hedge intended to make the package more palatable to a fractured Assembly where no single bloc controls anything close to a majority. The budget fight is unfolding against a backdrop of sharpening ideological battle lines. Olivier Faure, first secretary of the Socialist Party, has staked out a position built around what he calls “ecological socialism,” combining traditional left-wing tax and spending priorities with climate policy, while explicitly ruling out any accommodation with the far right. Faure has warned that his party will not support any Lecornu-backed measure that draws backing from Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, declaring flatly that “if…the far right supports it, we will vote to censure it” — a warning that any bill perceived as dependent on far-right votes will trigger a no-confidence motion from the Socialists, regardless of the bill’s substance. That dynamic hands outsized leverage to Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, who has used the summer to prepare the party’s platform for the 2027 campaign rather than negotiate over the current government’s budget. Bardella said his party has “worked hard this summer on a programme to get the country back on its feet,” language aimed squarely at voters rather than at his colleagues in the Assembly, and reflecting the extent to which the National Rally now positions itself as a government-in-waiting rather than a conventional opposition party working the current legislative session for incremental wins. On the center-right and center, Édouard Philippe of the Horizons party has tried to carve out space as a unifying figure capable of pulling together right-of-center and centrist voters wary of both the National Rally and the hard-left France Unbowed. Philippe has paired that pitch with a call for fiscal restraint, positioning himself as the candidate of budgetary seriousness against both a far right he views as fiscally reckless in its own way and a resurgent left pushing for higher taxes and spending. Adding another layer to the field, former Socialist President François Hollande has signaled his own 2027 ambitions are gaining momentum, calling for tax increases to address France’s economic strains — a notable break from the fiscal caution favored by Philippe and much of the governing center, and a sign that Hollande, who left office deeply unpopular in 2017, sees an opening to reposition himself for a political comeback. The immediate legislative agenda facing Lecornu’s government extends well beyond the budget itself. Lawmakers are also expected to take up an agricultural “rescue plan” aimed at addressing financial strain among French farmers, along with a reform of the country’s sick leave policy — both politically sensitive measures in their own right that will require the same kind of fragile, ad hoc coalition-building the government has relied on for every major initiative since the last National Assembly elections left no party or bloc with a majority. The stakes of the budget fight are difficult to overstate in a political system still adjusting to a period of chronic parliamentary fragmentation. France has cycled through multiple prime ministers in rapid succession in recent years as successive governments failed to build durable coalitions, and a failure to pass a budget this fall would raise fresh questions about the viability of governing at all under the current Assembly’s composition — potentially reviving talk of new legislative elections or a fresh government reshuffle less than a year before voters choose a new president. Moderate figures across the political spectrum have used the start of the new session to warn against the further radicalization of French politics, cautioning that both a resurgent far right and an emboldened far left threaten the kind of pragmatic, compromise-based governance that a divided Assembly requires to function at all. Whether those warnings translate into actual cooperation on the budget, or whether the approaching presidential election simply accelerates the trend toward legislative gridlock as every major figure positions for 2027 rather than for the next fiscal year, is likely to become clear well before voters cast their first ballots. For now, Lecornu’s government remains dependent on a shifting, issue-by-issue patchwork of support from lawmakers who, in nearly every case, have far more to gain politically from distancing themselves from the current government than from helping it succeed — a structural problem that no amount of “reversible” budget language is likely to fully solve. The instability has broader implications beyond France’s own borders. As one of the European Union’s two largest economies alongside Germany, France’s ability to pass a credible budget carries weight for European bond markets and for the bloc’s broader fiscal credibility at a moment when several member states are already navigating their own debt and spending pressures. European officials have watched the past several years of French governmental turnover with concern, worried that prolonged instability in Paris could complicate joint EU initiatives that require French buy-in, from defense spending coordination to the bloc’s collective response to Russia’s war in Ukraine,…