Failure in Paris, alarm in Brussels
Emmanuel Macron was supposed to regenerate and transform the French political landscape, but instead he has been unable to prevent the deepening degradation of the system, nor the pessimism and malaise that have fueled and enlarged the longest-standing far right in the European Union. With the fall of Prime Minister François Bayrou, France's existential crisis is even more uncertain today, and President Macron's authority is even weaker. This is the second government to fall in less than a year and the fifth prime minister Macron has appointed in just two years, and he must leave through the back door.
Budgetary pressures have cost Bayrou his job. But it was only a matter of time.
The far left and the far right have united against the proposed public spending cuts of a government condemned to permanent political instability. French public debt reached 114% of GDP at the beginning of 2025. It is one of the highest debts in the eurozone, behind only Greece and Italy. But with a minority government and a fractured assembly, with the priority objective of overthrowing Macron, Bayrou's budget was doomed to fail. The escalation of social mobilizations that are planned to paralyze the country in the coming days added even more drama to the urgency of a session that the government already knew it had lost.
Social media has gone viral with a call to block roads throughout the country this Wednesday in an attempt at cross-party mobilization that some compare to the beginning of the yellow vests. But in addition, the unions have called a general strike for next September 18.
The peripheral France of the "sacrificed popular classes", as described by the geographer Christophe Guilluy in a book that allowed us to understand a good part of the revolt of the yellow vests, remains tense. It is the very deep-rooted malaise that these years of political crisis have continued to fuel. The loss of purchasing power is now the primary concern of the French.
Aware of the disaster of the last early election, Macron is focused on seeking another minority candidate, while Marine Le Pen urges him to return to the polls, and media figures from the conservative Republicans, such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Thierry Breton, hint that perhaps the time has come to unlock the keys. National Rally of Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen.
In this fractured political landscape, the country will remain trapped in a sense of permanent decline. And if the French and European agendas normally feed off each other, the instability of the hexagon caps off a summer that has further aggravated the weakness of the EU. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who had to overcome a vote of no confidence last July, begins her political term this week before a European Parliament on a war footing. The tariff agreement reached with Donald Trump at the end of July has been hailed by a significant portion of the European Parliament as the capitulation of an EU frightened by Donald Trump's economic coercion. Von der Leyen's leadership is increasingly under scrutiny, and the winds blowing from Paris could set off alarm bells for social mobilization throughout the Union. Cuts in social spending and rising defense costs will continue to strain public finances in the eurozone, while peasant protests against the ratification of the trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur are not ruled out. And all of this is taking place in a deeply divided EU, both within the institutions and among member states. For the first time, von der Leyen's strategy of centralizing as much power as possible in her hands could backfire, as it has put her at the forefront of criticism from both political groups and some capitals. This weakness means, for example, that both the far-right Patriotes group—led, in this case, by Marine Le Pen—and the far-left in the European Parliament are preparing two new motions of censure against von der Leyen for this fall, which are also destined to fail but will again point to the evidence.
Furthermore, the German's recent statements to the Financial Times His claims about "fairly precise plans" for the deployment of European troops in Ukraine and a "US presence within the framework of a security network" earned him a harsh rebuke. Trump denied them, and German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius suggested he had said too much.
The European political autumn may be complicated at times, but the biggest challenge is the weakness of the leadership that must manage the internal and external tensions gripping the Union.