The French government has collapsed after prime minister François Bayrou lost a confidence vote in the National Assembly.
MPs overwhelmingly backed the motion to remove Mr Bayrou, voting 364-194 – a 170 majority.
Mr Bayrou is expected to resign on Tuesday, leaving Emmanuel Macron to search for a replacement or call snap elections.
The French prime minister called the vote of confidence in an attempt to force MPs to adopt his austerity budget.
During an impassioned speech to MPs, he warned: “You can get rid of the government, but you can’t get rid of reality.”
He said France’s debt mountain risked “enslaving our youth” of the eurozone’s second largest economy.
“France has not known a balanced budget for 51 years. Every year, debt accumulates,” he said as French public debt stood at 114 per cent of GDP.
Mr Macron will now be searching for his fourth prime minister in a little over a year, but there are doubts over whether they will be able to pull together a working coalition.
It is a mess largely of the French president’s own making. He called snap Assembly elections last year that left a hung parliament after losing European elections to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.
France is deadlocked over how to balance its books. Despite its spiralling debt crisis, the polarised and fragmented National Assembly cannot agree on cuts to the budget and pension reform.
So far Mr Macron, a lame duck without the control of parliament, has resisted calling another snap election.
His opponents on the hard-Left and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally on the Right want elections now and for the French president to resign.
Some observers say Mr Bayrou called the confidence motion in an attempt to create a legacy that might enable him to run for the Elysee in the future.
Justifying the call for this vote, the 74-year-old centrist said that he had wanted this “trial by truth” over his plans to cut the 2026 budget by £38bn to help cut the deficit from a forecast 5.4 per cent of gross domestic product this year to 4.6 percent of GDP in 2026.
“You will not turn your defeat into a victory. This is not an act of courage, it is a flight,” the Socialists’ parliamentary leader Boris Vallaud told him, referring to his ambitions for the 2027 presidential elections.
“It is in these moments of crisis… that the small and large acts of cowardice, the shameful opportunism, the hidden connivances are revealed in the shipwreck of discredited formations,” Marine Le Pen said as she tried to pin the blame for France’s woes on the various parties that have ruled France until now and position National Rally as an alternative for the future.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
