On Tuesday, October 8, the French left was able to count how many supporters it had in the Assemblée Nationale. The motion of no confidence it put forward against Prime Minister Michel Barnier and his government received just 197 votes, far from the 289 needed to topple the government. Only five independents joined forces with 192 MPs in the four groups of the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance. Within the NFP, only New Caledonian pro-independence MP Emmanuel Tjibaou did not support the motion.

As expected, the left defended its move as a matter of principle, against a government that had chosen not to ask for the Assemblée's confidence. And it continues to argue the government formed by Barnier's right-wing Les Républicains party and President Emmanuel Macron's coalition to be illegitimate: "Never, Mr. Prime Minister, should you have stood before me and sat on these benches with a government which, likewise, should never have been appointed," began Socialist leader Olivier Faure, noting that it had become "fashionable to act 'as if' the liberal and conservative right had won the parliamentary elections." (The NFP won more seats than any other bloc in the elections, but when LR and Macron joined forces seven weeks later, they surpassed that number.)

Faure said he was not convinced that the tax increases announced in the upcoming budget, to be presented on Thursday, would be carried out in a spirit of tax justice, and anticipated significant cuts to welfare policies: "Mr. Prime Minister, you said you wanted to 'do a lot with a little, starting from almost nothing.' In reality, you want to do a lot to people who have little and almost nothing to those who have everything."

Speaking to the Asseemblée, Barnier clarified certain points of his October 1 government policy statement, and responded to the two main grievances raised by the left. On the criticism of illegitimacy, he said: "Among relative majorities, what I note is that the relative majority that accompanies the government today is the least relative." On the budget, he added: "The reality we have to tell the French is that we're spending too much, we're spending money we don't have. And that we are borrowing at rates that are now moving further away from those of our European neighbors."

Although the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) had announced, in advance, that it would not be voting to topple the government, its justification was the most eagerly awaited of all. How was the RN, registered as an opposition group, going to justify the survival of the "pursuit of Macronism by other means," in RN speaker Guillaume Bigot's own words? The MP even described the group's political and strategic flexibility: "I'm going to explain to you why our group is burning to vote to topple [the government], why it will feel no qualms about voting for it tomorrow, but also why it won't vote for it today."

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