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America is not the only Western democracy mired in a political crisis brought on by the brinksmanship of feckless politicos. Americans can find company in their misery among the French, who have seen four prime ministers come and go in the past 18 months. President Emmanual Macron may stride the world like a colossus, but at home, he is very much on the back foot, mostly as a result of his own errors. 

This week’s embarrassing scene is the climax of the whole farcical sequence. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu resigned on Monday morning, 12 hours after naming his cabinet. Later that same day, Macron named him premier once again and tasked him with finding a parliamentary majority. Lecornu had 48 hours to break the stalemate, at the end of which he announced that he needed—another 48 hours. As this author writes on Wednesday night Paris time, France is holding its breath at two-day intervals. It is not too melodramatic to say that the country’s economy—and the survival of its regime, the Fifth Republic—are both on the line. 

The Fifth Republic—a bespoke creation of General de Gaulle amid the parliamentary crisis of the Fourth Republic and the Algerian War—was not designed to accommodate grand coalitions like those seen in Italy or Germany. Except for two interludes in the ’80s and ’90s, the presidential party has held a majority or plurality of seats. The goal is not debate among several parliamentary blocs, but the celerity of the executive’s action. Since July 2024 legislative elections, France has cycled through three prime ministers—Michel Barnier, Francois Bayrou, and now Lecornu. Each has tripped on the same insurmountable obstacle: cobbling together a coalition to adopt an annual budget and confront the deficit. 

The deficit, standing at nearly five percent, far surpasses France’s obligations under European Union treaties to keep that number under 3 percent. Add to that the mammoth debt of the country, weighing in at 115 percent of GDP. The bond markets have noticed. France is now frequently forced to borrow at higher rates than the erstwhile delinquents of Europe, notably Italy. Credit agencies have repeatedly downgraded its score, sending the cost of debt service soaring.  

The entire drama was brought on by Macron’s gambit. In June 2024, after a stinging defeat in the European parliamentary elections, he dissolved the lower house of parliament—the National Assembly—and called snap elections. (The French Senate, elected through indirect representation, resembles the United Kingdom’s House of Lords and only can exercise a suspensive veto.) According to most reports, he believed that his party, Renaissance and its partners, Horizons and the Democrats, would win and shore up his legitimacy. Instead, his bloc lost almost half their seats. The result was a legislature polarized into three blocs: Macron’s center (reinforced by the Republicans), Le Pen’s nationalist right, and the left’s four warring sects (La France Insoumise, the Socialists, the Communists, and the Greens). 

None of these groups can strike a budget deal. The scene is familiar to Americans: The ensemble of the political class agrees on the need to control the deficit, but no one wants to get their hand out of the till. The parties of the left have promoted a 2 percent levy on fortunes of more than 150 million euros—the so-called Zucman tax—in order to balance the books. The left-wing arc also claims that corporate welfare has pitched the country into the ditch, citing figures showing 300 million euros in tax abatements for private firms. The left, however, is not at war with the wealthy and multinationals-it is at war with mathematics. The rosiest estimates reckon that the Zucman tax would bring in 15 billion euros, and this assumes that the levy does not precipitate significant capital flight. Almost all of the subsidies decried as corporate welfare are payroll-tax exemptions granted to small businesses; absent these subventions, countless jobs would disappear. 

The populist right, i.e., Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and its Union of the Republican Right vassal party, panders to its downwardly-mobile electorate—the lower middle classes of the periphery who understandably already feel beleaguered—in promising that fiscal restraint will cost their base nothing. Le Pen and her right-hand man, Jordan Bardella, vow that “savings on immigration” will close the deficit, pointing to a program guaranteeing health-care coverage to illegal aliens. The rub is that this line-item, Aide Medical d’Etat, costs in the hundreds of millions per annum, not billions. Ditto for the RN’s old saws about elected officials living off the fat of the land: Eliminating perquisites for a reviled leadership class is good politics, but it will barely make a dent. 

And no one, other than the sinking center, wants to touch the third rail: pensions. Macron’s retirement reform, passed in 2023 in the teeth of ferocious opposition, was premised on sound economic logic. France’s median pensioner is today richer than the median worker, and an aging population means that the retirement system, along with the panoply of welfare state programs, now weighs more heavily than ever on the economy and public finances. Pension reform will eventually raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, a threshold that is still lower than almost all other peer countries. But Macron’s overhaul applies only to future beneficiaries, not current recipients.

Try to pry a sou from a French senior’s hand at your own risk. Michel Barnier, who served as prime minister from September to December 2024, learned the hard way. He proposed for Fiscal Year 2025—the last budget!—that retirees’ cost-of-living adjustments be frozen for six months; he was then deposed in a no-confidence vote in which the nationalist right and the entire left joined hands.  

The center, embodied by Macron’s Renaissance and two other partner factions, the Democrats and Horizons, and the center-right, namely the Gaullist successor party, the Republicans, have tried to steer away from the fiscal cliff. But each has been tainted and effectively discredited by its association with a president whose name has become a byword for hauteur and recklessness. Lecornu and Bayrou have also turned off a wide swath of voters through showy displays intended to work their will on the parliament. 

The night is dark and we are far from home. In the case of a new dissolution and fresh parliamentary elections, the RN would run the board, possibly securing a majority in the National Assembly. The RN and the far left—La France Insoumise—are alone in pressing for an immediate return to the polls. The center and the moderate factions of the left—the Socialists, Greens, and Communists—want to avoid this at all costs. So does the central bloc, composed of Macron’s collaborators and the Republicans.And yet, none of these formations can come to terms on a modus vivendi and a budget.

There are now three options on the table: Among the parties fearful of a dissolution, one will blink first, resulting in a coalition running from the center-left to the center-right; Macron will be forced to call new legislative elections; or Macron will be pushed to resign, advancing the presidential election originally scheduled for April 2027. Cries for Macron’s resignation are indeed mounting, coming even from one of his former prime ministers, Edouard Philippe. Whatever the case, Macron’s days—and Macronism’s—are drawing to a close.