What happened
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu resigned Monday, less than 24 hours after forming a cabinet to lead his country through a period of prolonged instability.
Lecornu, a close ally of French President Emmanuel Macron, was the country’s third prime minister to step down in the past year and had been in office for less than a month, making his the shortest-lived government in modern French history.
Who said what
“The conditions were not fulfilled for me to carry out my function as prime minister,” Lecornu said in a statement blaming “partisan appetites” for his rapid downfall. His resignation, which shocked France, “came amid turmoil over the composition of his cabinet, an uneasy coalition of centrists and conservatives,” The New York Times said.
The collapse of the government prompted calls from the leftist France Unbowed and far-right National Rally parties for Macron to call snap elections, and they have already launched efforts to “encourage French citizens to register to vote,” France 24 said. “The farce has lasted long enough,” National Rally panjandrum Marine Le Pen told reporters.
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What next?
Macron asked Lecornu, who is staying on in a caretaker capacity, to “hold last-ditch talks with other political parties” in an effort to “chart a path out of the crisis,” said Reuters. But with France’s 2027 presidential elections on the horizon, the BBC said, the “deeper truth” of this political crisis is that the “more time passes, the harder it is going to be for anyone — even the most gifted of Macron acolytes — to set up a stable government.”
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