Macron should step down early, says his first PM

Emmanuel Macron should name a prime minister to push through a budget and then call early presidential elections to solve France’s political crisis, his first prime minister has said.

Édouard Philippe’s comments come after France’s third prime minister in a year, Sébastien Lecornu, resigned on Monday after his bid to form a government fell apart.

Macron has asked him to make a last-ditch plan for stability by the end of Wednesday – but support for the French president appears to be waning even among his allies.

Philippe, who was prime minister from 2017-20 and now leads the centrist Horizons party, said he was “not in favour of his immediate and abrupt resignation”, but that it was up to the president to live up to his mandate.

Meanwhile, Gabriel Attal – who leads Macron’s Renaissance party and was prime minister for six months in 2024 – went on national TV on Monday night to say he “no longer understands the decisions made by the president of the republic”.

The president had tried to re-establish control three times in the past year, said Attal, and it was now time to share power with other parties: “I think we should try something else.”

Until now, pressure on the 47-year-old French president to resign has come largely from his political opponents on the more radical left and hard right.

The public interventions from his allies indicate just how serious the political crisis has become.

Macron, who has been in office since 2017, was captured on video walking alone by the River Seine in Paris on Monday, followed by his bodyguards, as the latest crisis swirled around his presidency.

His entourage indicated that he would “take responsibility” if Lecornu’s last-ditch talks failed, without specifying that that would mean.

Credit: bbc.com

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