Macron to Accept Prime Minister’s Resignation, Leaving France Without Actual Government

French President Emmanuel Macron has decided to accept the resignation of his prime minister after his governing coalition failed to secure a majority in the National Assembly during the snap legislative elections earlier this month.

From Tuesday evening the French government is officially rudderless, with Macron’s decision to finally accept Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s resignation meaning that the government cannot pass any legislation, including the annual budget.

However, with the parliament locked in a three-way split between the far-left New Popular Front, Macronist neo-liberals, and the populist National Rally and centre-right Les Républicains, the President has said that Attal’s government will continue in a caretaker role to handle the day-to-day business of government, and outside of which can only act in the case of emergencies.

In his last Council of Ministers meeting on Tuesday as the head of the government, Attal said that he is ready to “suffer the continuity of the state for as long as necessary,” while telling Macron that “the future is to be written.” Under the French constitution, there is technically no limit to how long this situation can last, with it being entirely at the discretion of the president.

While a caretaker government is not without precedent in France, they have only lasted a few days in the past, Le Figaro reports. Attal initially tendered his resignation on July 7th in the immediate aftermath of the second round of snap elections called by Macron following his embarrassing defeat in the European Parliament elections to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally last month.

Le Pen’s faction got the highest number of votes in both rounds of the subsequent national election, but quirks of the system and tactical voting led by Macron handed her third place in seats, leading to the present political paralysis.

The decision by Macron to finally accept his deputy’s resignation on Tuesday was likely influenced by the parliamentary schedule, as it allows Attal and other members of the government to take part in the election of the National Assembly’s president when the legislative body gathers on Thursday.

The decision from Macron also comes after the breakdown of negotiations to coalesce around a PM candidate within the leftist New Popular Front (NFP), a group of communists, environmentalists, and social democrats hastily cobbled together prior to the elections in the hopes of preventing the populist right from taking over the government.

Following Le Pen’s victory in the first round of the elections, Macron made a controversial move to ally with the far-left faction, with over 200 candidates from Macron’s coalition or from the NFP tactically standing down in constituencies depending on which candidate stood the best chance to defeat the Le Pen-backed challenger.

This resulted in the New Popular Front coming out on top in the elections, though falling short of a majority in the Assembly. The bloc is already fraught with divisions, with the socialists — the more moderate faction within the group — and others refusing to back a prime minister candidate from La France Insoumise (LFI), the far-left party within the NFP headed up by radical Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is calling for a 90 per cent tax on the wealthy in France.

Despite siding with them during the election to defeat Le Pen, Macron has also said that his faction in the parliament would refuse to back a member of the LFI as prime minister, meaning that the president is hoping to break up the New Popular Front and perhaps convince the socialists or others to break away and form a new alliance in the Assembly around a consensus left-wing candidate.

However, there is no guarantee that Macron’s gamble will pay off. Commenting on the current state of play, the head of the Communist Party — a member of the New Popular Front — Fabien Roussel told BFMTV on Tuesday: “If we don’t find solutions in the next few hours or in the next few days, it would be a real shipwreck.”

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