The French government is facing imminent collapse

Embattled President Emmanuel Macron risks paralysis at a time of looming strikes, soaring debt and fractured politics.

- Jonathan Eyal

France is on the brink of a fresh political crisis. In a parliamentary vote scheduled for Sept 8, French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou's government is likely to be defeated and forced to resign.

So far, hardly remarkable. After all, stories of French political crises are not exactly unusual. Furthermore, under French constitutional arrangements, it's President Emmanuel Macron rather than the prime minister who holds most power. And since Mr Macron's current term of office only expires in 2027, it's easy to dismiss the approaching French political tremor as just another short-lived tantrum, of interest only to those very few who obsess about France's politics.

An easy assumption, but also a very wrong one. For if Mr Bayrou is defeated in a few days, as now seems very likely, President Macron would have lost three prime ministers in just over a year. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the 19th-century Irish author, to lose one prime minister may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose three looks like carelessness.

The reality is that President Macron, who is himself deeply unpopular, is running out of political options. He faces a Parliament which he does not control, and which is itself deeply divided between extreme left and extreme right parties. He can dissolve Parliament and call early elections, but all opinion polls indicate that fresh ballots will, at best, merely reproduce today's political paralysis.

The country's political crisis comes at a critical time for the rest of Europe, just as most of the continent's other nations are groaning under the heavy burden of unsustainable debt levels and low economic growth.