Emmanuel Macron crossed a major line on Friday, when he again avoided the political reality he must face up to, in a seemingly interminable sequence which has become the hallmark of his second and final term as French president.
This was his decision to reappoint Sébastien Lecornu as prime minister, the same Lecornu who resigned as prime minister five days earlier. “I accept – as my duty – the mission that has been given to me,” announced the latter in a post on X.
To take measure of the lunacy of the situation it must be written down clearly in black and white; after three electoral defeats, the last of which shrank his parliamentary support into a minority, and after the subsequent resignations of three minority governments, the French president has now brought back Lecornu, one of his closest allies, to the post he had just slammed the door upon.
Over recent days, as the rumour of Lecornu’s reappointment began circulating, even the most loyal of Macron’s supporters dismissed the idea. “It would not be a good signal,” commented Hervé Marseille, the influential leader of the centre-right group in the Senate. Questioned about a possible reappointment of Lecornu during an interview with public radio France Info, the outgoing minister for ecological transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, one of the Macron faithful, declared: “I wouldn’t understand that.”
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In an attempt to explain the move, officials at the French presidential office, the Élysée Palace, hid behind the prerogative handed to Macron by the constitution, which sets out that it is the president who chooses who should be prime minister. That is a legal fact, and a political absurdity. What is at stake here is a democracy that has the consent of the people, and the effectiveness of popular sovereignty, the very energy of democracy.
In face of such weighty questions, it is startling to observe the flippancy of a self-satisfied executive. After eight years in office, Macron has methodically broken off with those among his entourage who were strong personalities and figures of authority. Those advisers who dare to openly contradict him have become rare, if not inexistant. “He is increasingly authoritarian and abrupt during meetings,” commented one of them, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Keeping hold on power at whatever cost
Political figures who once stood alongside Macron are also now marking their distance. “His audacity sometimes leads him to not sufficiently respect the institutions,” recently commented Édouard Philippe, Macron’s first prime minister, from 2017 to 2020, and who, as leader of the centre-right movement Horizons, has called on Macron to step down for early presidential elections (under the terms of the constitution, Macron cannot stand for a third term). Meanwhile, Gabriel Attal, now leader of the Macron-supporting centre-right parliamentary group, and who served as prime minister for nine months until the French president called snap parliamentary elections last year, has declared that he no longer understands Macron’s decisions, inviting him to share power.
Who indeed does still understand Macron’s decisions? With the fall last December of the conservative veteran Michel Barnier, the first to lead a Macron minority government since the snap elections, the president’s entourage insisted that the president would be forced to change his plans. It was the same refrain with the downfall of Barnier’s successor, François Bayrou, and now with Sébastien Lecornu. After the summer recess, one of Macron’s closest advisors happily commented: “Now, he will budge, that’s certain, he knows he no longer has any choice.” While an outgoing minister from Lecornu’s first government, which lasted 14 hours before the latter’s resignation on Monday, predicted. “We know that if we fall the next government will be the Left. It’s their turn.”
Even the Socialist Party was fooled into believing so. On Tuesday, amid heightening rumours of the appointment as prime minister of the Parti Socialiste general secretary Olivier Faure, many of Macron’s allies progressively resigned themselves to the move. But it was never in fact Macron’s intention, sure as he was that he could keep political control.
The coming days will be decisive, with the announcement to come of the composition of the new government, its first cabinet meeting due on Monday, the adoption then of the draft budget legislation for 2026, and the prime minister’s policy presentation.
Last weekend, when Lecornu announced his first government, there was a similar show of an all-powerful Macron in the return he imposed of around a dozen outgoing ministers, and the controversial appointments of two others. These included Bruno Le Maire, who served as Macron’s first finance and economy minister from 2017 to 2024 (and who as such is targeted as partly responsible for France’s ballooning public debt), and whose presence led to the conservative Les Républicains party (LR) pulling out of government, prompting Lecornu’s resignation.
It was Macron who sought the appointment of MP Éric Woerth, an LR party veteran closely associated with Nicolas Sarkozy (and due to re-tried on appeal next year in the Gaddafi-Sarkozy election funding case), along with the return from the previous Bayrou government of another conservative veteran, culture minister Rachida Dati, due to stand trial next year on corruption charges.
At such a level of isolation, an analysis of Macron’s moves spills over into considerations that are beyond politics alone. Manon Aubry, from the radical-left LFI party and a Member of the European Parliament, on Friday described the French president as “raving mad”. A ranking member of the Right, speaking on condition his name is withheld, spoke of the “pathological” nature of Macron’s behaviour, his state of “denial” and “progressive isolation” in which he has “reconstructed a reality”. There are many in the president’s own camp who echo such appraisals.
This situation is leading the country to the cliff face. At a moment when everything indicated that the time had come for him to share power, or step down, Macron is now holding on desperately to hope in the form of Lecornu, one of the last of the faithful, who he appreciates as much for his discretion as his loyalty, and who his wife reportedly adores (and who makes her laugh).
Lecornu is not unaware of the pathetic turn of the situation and the gathering opposition that his nomination has prompted. Tasked by Macron, immediately after his resignation last week, to sound out the possible members of a new government, Lecornu did so for two days before declaring, in an interview on TV channel France 2, that, “I consider my mission is completed”. His entourage repeated over recent days that he did not want to be reappointed, before he finally accepted it late on Friday evening, out of what he called a sense of “duty”.
Lecornu’s second government is now in the hands of fate. There will be much to talk about in the coming days, on the composition of the government, on the whys and the wherefores, the negotiations with the socialists, a vote of confidence, the concessions envisaged. But what emerges above all is the striking confiscation of power by just a few, and who have been rejected in the ballot boxes and in public expression.
It is about the deaf ear of the executive turned towards all the forces – in parliament, in professional bodies and in the voluntary sector – who are calling for greater democracy. It is about the total refusal of the French president to question his political legitimacy other than through the prism of the rigid framework of the constitution.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
This abridged English version by Graham Tearse