Hugh SchofieldParis correspondent
In the end, Emmanuel Macron’s man wasn’t able to pull it off either.
When Sébastien Lecornu was appointed France’s prime minister three and a half weeks ago, the spin was that this was President Macron’s last card.
A last card, we were told, but a good one.
The 39-year-old was a presidential protégé – loyal, modest, undemonstrative. It was thought he had what it took to fix a discreet deal between the parties and save French politics from implosion.
But as it turns out, that wasn’t the case.
Lecornu has arguably gone down in even more embarrassing circumstances than his two ill-fated predecessors.
At least Michel Barnier and François Bayrou both presided for a short while over their governments, and tabled a few ideas.
Lecornu, on the other hand, named his cabinet late Sunday afternoon and by Monday morning he had lost it. He didn’t even get to make his inaugural address to parliament, which was planned for Tuesday.
His government lasted for precisely 14 hours.
The immediate cause of his calamitous fin de régime is now clear. It was the conservative Republicans party (LR) and their leader, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau.
With its 40 or so MPs, the LR has become a key part of the centre-right alliance that is trying to run France.
Retailleau has made much of his presence in government about projecting himself and his party as natural candidates for the offices of state.
Earlier on Sunday, he’d told Lecornu that he was willing to stay on as minister. But within an hour of the cabinet being announced, he posted on social media that there’d been a change of heart: LR might not be joining after all.
Officially it was because Lecornu had done the dirty by naming former finance minister Bruno Le Maire as his pick for defence.
Le Maire – a former party colleague – is a particular bugbear of LR, partly because he betrayed them by joining Macron, and partly because they blame him for letting French debt spiral out of control when in control of the country’s finances.
Either way, LR accuses Lecornu of hiding Le Maire’s nomination – apparently Retailleau didn’t learn of it until he turned on his television.
And at the end of Monday there was a new twist. Le Maire agreed not to become a minister and Macron gave his outgoing prime minister a last-minute reprieve of 48 hours, to see if he could persuade LR into the government.
So, the situation remains fluid.
Whatever happens, the deeper truth is that the more time passes, the harder it is going to be for anyone – even the most gifted of Macron acolytes – to set up a stable government.
Why? Because the more time passes, the closer France gets to its next big electoral moment – the 2027 French presidential election.
So unpopular is Macron today that all who associate themselves with him risk a severe beating the next time the public gets a chance to vote.
As a result, the fractious centre-right alliance at the heart of Macron-land is now beginning to splinter.
The LR are out, but many centrists are starting to mutter too. Even the president’s onetime wunderkind former prime minister Gabriel Attal is keeping his distance.
If it feels like the twilight of an era, then that is what it is. The faithful are leaving, preparing for a world without Macron. It might not be so far away.
