The brief, unhappy story of the latest French government, whose only achievement was to set a record for the brevity of its tenure, amounts to the chronicle of a disaster foretold.
Sébastien Lecornu, who quit on Monday after 28 days as prime minister, had promised a “rupture” from the policies of a series of short-lived governments, but was himself the embodiment of continuity and of the stubborn persistence of President Emmanuel Macron in sticking with his center-right inner circle.
That can work when the president controls the Parliament. Mr. Macron does not. The National Assembly, or lower house, is split three ways among the nationalist far right of Marine Le Pen, the left and far left most vociferously represented by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and an enfeebled center with a fading loyalty to a term-limited Mr. Macron.
The result has been five governments in the past 21 months and chaos. The stable Italy of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is gloating.
When, after weeks of consultation, Mr. Lecornu revealed his new cabinet on Sunday evening, it amounted to a clumsy rehash of the old. The inclusion of Bruno Le Maire, the former minister of finance widely blamed for the rise in French debt to $4 trillion during his seven-year tenure, amounted to a provocation. The government, stillborn, lasted 836 minutes.
What now? Mr. Macron announced Monday evening that he had asked Mr. Lecornu to stay on in a caretaker capacity for 48 hours to see if he could find “a platform of action and stability for the country.” Mr. Lecornu accepted, saying he would inform the president if this was possible or not by then.
“We are dancing on the ruins of our institutions,” Alain Duhamel, a prominent political analyst and author, told the RMC radio station. “If Mr. Macron resigns, that will be the death of the Fifth Republic.”
Very few people expect Mr. Macron to quit, and he is under no obligation to do so, but he has been reduced to choosing the least bad of various unpalatable courses. The current incarnation of the Fifth Republic resembles nothing so much as the death throes of the Fourth Republic, when chronic instability in Parliament and in government led Charles de Gaulle in 1958 to design a constitution with power heavily vested in the presidency.
Mr. Macron still has those considerable powers but appears cornered, at least if Mr. Lecornu fails in his last-ditch mission. He can dissolve Parliament, which is likely to lead to a surge in support for Ms. Le Pen and her party in the ensuing election. He could do what he has resisted doing and ask a center-left politician to try to form a government. Or he could opt for more of the same and hope for the miracle of a different result.
“We have exhausted the options for finding a stable government in this Parliament,” Anne-Charlène Bezzina, a senior lecturer in public law at the University of Rouen, said in an interview. “So the best solution is elections and a dissolution of Parliament, which will at least clarify the people’s will.”
The extreme right and left in the current National Assembly agree on very little other than the need for more than cosmetic change in France and a fierce hostility to Mr. Macron, whose prominent role on the world stage has been accompanied by a crumbling political foundation at home. More and more, France can feel like the United States in 2016, when people threw up their hands in exasperation and opted for change, any change, in the form of Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Macron is “more than ever completely in denial of the political situation,” said Vincent Martigny, a professor of political science at Côte d’Azur University in Nice. “So we have an absolute blockage.”
Unpopular after more than eight years in office, with about 18 months left of his presidency, Mr. Macron is under constant pressure from the far left to resign and from the far right to call parliamentary elections.
“There can be no restored stability without a return to the ballot box and without the dissolution of the National Assembly,” Jordan Bardella, Ms. Le Pen’s popular young protégé, told TV reporters on Monday.
Their anti-immigrant National Rally party and its allies currently hold 138 seats in the 577-member National Assembly. It would have to more than double that score to secure an absolute majority of 289 seats, an unlikely outcome but not an impossible one. Even short of that number it could join forces with the far left in revoking the unpopular 2023 legislation pushed through by Mr. Macron that raised the retirement age to 64 from 62.
But continued deadlock, even after another election, is as likely as any other result, and a reversal of the pension law would appear to amount to political madness when the French budget deficit is soaring.
Mr. Lecornu, in a parting statement, noted that “political parties continue to adopt positions as if they have the absolute majority in the National Assembly,” and deplored the absence of any spirit of compromise. Responsibility for France’s current plight is far from lying exclusively with Mr. Macron.
A fundamental problem is that for decades the Fifth Republic has functioned either with a clear majority in Parliament supporting the president, as during Mr. Macron’s first term, or a clear majority opposing the president, as when Jacques Chirac was the center-right president and Lionel Jospin the Socialist prime minister from 1997 to 2002. It does not work well with a fractured parliament.
In this sense, the current crisis is not merely political in nature, but constitutional. How it will be resolved is unclear. Mr. Lecornu said that “one must always put country before party,” but a growing number of French people appear to believe that putting country first involves blowing up the system.
Aurelien Breeden and Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris, and Catherine Porter from Nîmes, France.