The survival of Sèbastien Lecornu’s government will be decided by a handful of votes. The chamber of the National Assembly will examine and vote tomorrow starting at 9 am on the two motions of censure against the executive presented by the Rassemblement National and La France Insoumise. On paper there are no numbers to distrust Lecornu. The combined votes of RN, LFI, Ecologists and Communists will not reach the absolute majority of 289, and the votes in favor of censorship, if all the deputies follow the party’s indications, should stop at 265, 24 less than the majority needed to bring down the executive.
But there are also pitfalls. Some socialist deputies, “at least three” out of 69 according to the party secretary, Olivier Faure, have already announced that they will vote to distrust Lecornu, just as some defaillance could be seen among the ranks of the Republicans and the Macronist bloc which has badly digested Lecornu’s decision to take a step back on the pension reform, the flag of Emmanuel Macron’s mandate.
The Socialists, after having cashed in on the prime minister’s openness about the postponement of the highly contested social security reform approved in 2023, have made it clear that they will not vote for censure, without explicitly declaring it. But the party has already put another request on the table that could make the fragile ‘majority’ falter while the Assembly is grappling with the debate on the budget measure, namely the tax on the ‘super-rich’, a measure disliked by the centrists of the Macron area and the moderate right of the Republicans.
The radical left of La France Insoumise, with Ecologists and Communists, aims to bring down Lecornu by voting for their own motion, while the far right of the Rassemblement National intends to vote for both their own motion and that of LFI in order to prevent Lecornu from remaining in Matignon. The Socialist Party, the Liot group and the Republicans will not vote for ‘no confidence’, while the Macronist groups have not given clear instructions to their deputies, but their vote, barring defections, is considered a given.
Horizons centrists are also in trouble. The party’s vice-president, Christelle Morancais, declared that if she had been a parliamentarian, she would have voted “to censure the government, which is selling out the future of the French people on the altar of party interests.” A position which however “does not bind the party”, clarified the entourage of the leader and former prime minister E’douard Philippe.
However, many parliamentarians believe that even if the government were to survive tomorrow’s censure vote with a margin of around twenty votes, the budget would still have to be approved, a path full of pitfalls for Lecornu’s survival. If the government doesn’t fall tomorrow, “it won’t last long”, predicts Marine Le Pen, who foresees the dissolution of the Assembly “in three weeks or three months”.