Prime Minister François Bayrou dropped something of a bombshell at a press conference on Monday, declaring that he would call a confidence vote in his government on 8 September over what he described as France’s disastrous public finances.
The move wrong-footed both parliament and the streets. Calls for nationwide protests on 10 September were spreading on social media, quickly picked up by left-wing parties.
But the prime minister announced that he would pre-empt events by seeking the parliament’s confidence two days earlier, in a speech outlining his government’s policy agenda.
“The country’s financial situation forces us to act in two stages,” Bayrou insisted, arguing that the first step was “to agree on the urgency of the matter.”
The details of measures to tackle the spiralling public deficit, he said, would come later – and all of them would be “negotiable”. The 8 September vote is nonetheless expected to endorse “the scale of the effort”, namely a reduction of nearly €44 billion in France’s deficit.
In two weeks, MPs will face a stark choice: “If you command a majority, the government stands. If you don’t, the government falls,” Bayrou summed up, adding that the greatest risk would have been to “do nothing at all”.
Reacting immediately, Mathilde Panot, leader of the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) group in parliament, welcomed what she sees as a chance to bring down the government. “Bayrou has chosen his own departure date,” she declared with scorn.
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