Political free fall: Lecornu resigns as Macron’s fifth prime minister in two years

October 6, 2025 - 14:55

France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu resigned Monday, hours after unveiling a cabinet that kept 13 of 18 ministers from the toppled Bayrou team—ending the shortest-lived government in modern French history and sealing a record-breaking 27-day premiership.

The Élysée accepted his resignation as left-wing and right-wing opponents prepared no-confidence motions, making survival mathematically implausible in a fractured National Assembly.

Lecornu was President Emmanuel Macron’s fifth prime minister in less than two years—and his seventh since 2017—a revolving-door record unprecedented in the Fifth Republic and a stark measure of the presidency’s deepening instability.

His exit underscores a deeper institutional malaise since Macron lost his majority in 2022 and then further splintered parliament with snap elections last year.

Continuity without consensus has become a governing reflex; it repeatedly fails in a chamber where the center cannot hold and coalition habits barely exist.

The backlash was immediate. National Rally’s Jordan Bardella urged dissolution and a return to the polls.

Mathilde Panot, a prominent leftist figure from France Unbowed, said the “countdown has begun” and that Macron must go.

Far-right polemicist Éric Zemmour called for early presidential elections, capturing the sense of a presidency cornered by arithmetic and legitimacy.

Markets recoiled. Paris’s CAC 40 dropped roughly 2% as bank stocks slid 6–7%, and the euro fell about 0.7% to $1.1665, signaling investor alarm over policy paralysis. Macron faces narrowing options and a mounting credibility problem.

Leave a Comment