By Elizabeth Pineau
PARIS, Jan 14 (Reuters) – The French government faces two no-confidence votes on Wednesday that are not expected to pass, which would clear the way for the government to focus on yet another budget showdown in the coming days.
The no-confidence motions, filed by the far-right National Rally (RN) and hard-left France Unbowed (LFI), aim to protest the European Union’s trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc.
Despite French opposition, EU member states last week approved the signing of the long-debated deal with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The RN and LFI accuse the government of not doing enough to block it.
“The French executive never really gave itself the means to prevent the adoption of this agreement,” LFI said.
VOTES IN THE AFTERNOON
The two motions will be examined by the lower house of parliament in the afternoon.
The Socialist Party has ruled out backing them and the conservative The Republicans said they would not vote to censure the government over Mercosur.
“A motion of censure in France achieves nothing. It’s now in the European Parliament that the battle will take place,” The Republicans leader Bruno Retailleau told Europe 1/CNews.
Government insiders said Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu will let the no-confidence motions run their course before returning to the fraught budget talks.
NEXT ON THE AGENDA: TOUGH BUDGET TALKS
One of several options regarding the country’s 2026 budget would be for the prime minister to invoke Article 49.3 of the Constitution to push through the finance bill without a vote, after negotiating a text with all groups except the RN and LFI, one government source said. That would almost certainly lead to more motions of no confidence.
Lawmakers are eager to end weeks of wrangling over the budget, even if it means the country’s deficit remains near 5%, sources said.
President Emmanuel Macron, according to his entourage, wants a budget adopted in January and is “neutral” on how to achieve that.
HUNG PARLIAMENT
Government spokeswoman Maud Bregeon said on Tuesday that “nothing is excluded” to pass the budget. Lecornu, who last week warned of a possible dissolution of parliament if his government fell, later softened his tone: “I want neither censure nor dissolution. My fight is for stability and against disorder,” he told Le Parisien.
France’s political situation has been fragile since 2022, when Macron lost his majority in parliament.
His problems worsened when he unexpectedly called early legislative elections in mid-2024, only to deliver a hung parliament split between three distinct ideological blocs: his centre-right alliance, the left, and the far-right RN.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Pineau; Additional reporting by Blandine Henault and Zhifan Liu; Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
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