French President Emmanuel Macron closed the door to a left-wing government led by the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) alliance on Monday, August 26. In a press release sent by the Elysée shortly before 8 pm, Macron ruled out appointing the NFP's candidate, Lucie Castets, as prime minister. "Institutional stability dictates that this option should not be retained," he argued, because such a government "based solely on the platform and parties proposed by the alliance with the most MPs, the Nouveau Front Populaire, would immediately be censured by all the other groups represented in the Assemblée Nationale." It "would immediately have a majority of more than 350 MPs against it, preventing it de facto from acting," continued the president, adding up the votes of his centrist coalition (166), the right (47) and the far right (142), who have all told him in recent days that they would immediately vote a motion of no-confidence against an NFP government.

Appointing the senior civil servant Castets as prime minister, as requested by the four parties making up the left-wing alliance, "meant accepting that she would be overthrown," explained the head of state's entourage. "If the president appointed a prime minister knowing that they would fall, he would be in breach of the Constitution, which requires him to ensure the stability and independence of the country."

On Saturday, the leader of the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, challenged the president's camp by suggesting that LFI members would not be part of an NFP government if it was this idea that prevented the president from naming Castets. It was seen as an attempt to demonstrate that the first round of discussions was in fact designed to sideline the left-wing coalition, whose policy platform the president and his camp reject.

Macron let outgoing Prime Minister Gabriel Attal respond to Mélenchon on Monday. Attal denounced "a sham of openness" and an "attempted coup de force," considering, in a letter addressed to the 99 MPs of his group, that Mélenchon's proposal amounted to "removing a name from the storefront, but changing nothing about what's inside." He went on to say that the "unilateral application" of the NFP's policy platform "would lead to an unprecedented fiscal bludgeoning," "to the economic collapse of our country" and "to the dangerous calling into question of some of our most fundamental values, foremost among which is secularism."

Clément Beaune, the deputy secretary general of Macron's Renaissance party, was for his part keen to avoid alienating the left and, in passing, took a dig at the outgoing prime minister. He criticized Attal's characterization of the proposal made by the leader of the radical left as a "coup de force." "Let's remain open and constructive, we can't ourselves talk like LFI," he advised.

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