France’s Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu survived the first of two no-confidence votes on Monday, making it all but certain that parliament will adopt the delayed 2026 budget.
A censure motion from far-left lawmakers in the National Assembly won 260 votes, falling short of the 289 required to topple the minority government and reject the budget. A separate motion from the far right is likely to fail by an even larger margin – echoing the result of similar ballots in recent weeks.
The French premier and his government prevailed after making concessions to convince centre-left Socialist lawmakers to abstain in a series of no-confidence votes over the budget in recent weeks.
The new finance bill has smaller spending cuts and tax increases than earlier proposals, meaning the deficit for the year will be larger than initially planned. But Lecornu has avoided the fate of his predecessors, Michel Barnier and François Bayrou, who were both forced to resign by the National Assembly in disagreements over austerity measures.