French Prime Minister resigns after less than a month in office
France’s Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has resigned, less than a day after his cabinet was unveiled.
The Elysée Palace announced that after Lecornu met President Emmanuel Macron for an hour on Monday, October 6, 2025, morning.
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The shock move comes only 26 days after Lecornu was appointed prime minister following the collapse of the previous government of François Bayrou.
Parties across the board in the National Assembly had fiercely criticised the composition of Lecornu’s cabinet, which was largely unchanged from Bayrou’s, and threatened to vote it down.
Several parties are now clamouring for early elections, with some calling for Macron to resign too – although he has always said he will not stand down before his term ends in 2027.
“Macron needs to choose: dissolution of parliament or resignation,” said Sébastien Chenu, one of the leading figures of the far-right National Rally (RN).
Lecornu – the former armed forces minister and a Macron loyalist – was France’s fifth prime minister in under two years.
French politics has been highly unstable since July 2024, when snap parliamentary elections resulted in a hung parliament.
This has made it difficult for any prime minister to garner the necessary support to pass any bills.
Bayrou’s government was voted down in September after parliament refused to back his austerity budget, which aimed to slash government spending by 7.548 trillion shillings.
France’s deficit reached 5.8 per cent of GDP in 2024, and its national debt is 114 per cent of GDP. That is the third-highest public debt in the eurozone after Greece and Italy, and equivalent to almost 7.8 million shillings per French citizen.
Stocks fell sharply on the Paris exchange after the news of Lecornu’s resignation broke on Monday, October 6, 2025, morning.
Opposition parties said Lecornu had backtracked on the “profound break” with past politics that he had promised when he took over from the unpopular Bayrou, who was ousted on September 9, 2025, over a proposed budget squeeze.
The question now is whether the president will decide to dissolve parliament and call another snap election.
Jordan Bardella, the president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, said: “There cannot be a return to stability without a return to the ballot box and the national assembly being dissolved.
“It was very clearly Emmanuel Macron who decided this government himself. He has understood nothing of the political situation we are in.”
The National Rally has pushed for another election, believing they can increase their seats and presence in parliament.
France has gone through a period of instability and political crisis since the centrist Macron called an inconclusive snap election last year. The parliament remains divided between the three blocs: the left, the far right, and the centre, with no clear majority.
