France’s government has survived a confidence vote thanks to the Parti Socialiste’s abstention. While Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu promises to suspend unpopular changes to pensions, unions object that the retirement age hike has merely been delayed.
France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, hung on to power last Thursday after a no-confidence motion against his government failed by just eighteen votes. A majority of Parti Socialiste lawmakers, in theory in the opposition, withheld their votes from the motion, ensuring Lecornu’s survival. Why? Because, they say, Lecornu has agreed to retreat on President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform.
For Lecornu, it was a welcome stay of execution. His first government collapsed almost immediately on Monday, October 6. On Friday that same week, Macron reappointed Lecornu, giving him forty-eight hours to negotiate a deal to keep his government alive long enough to pass an austerity budget by the end of 2025.
According to Le Parisien, before reappointing his prime minister, Macron called Parti Socialiste leader Olivier Faure to lock down a guarantee that it wouldn’t topple him. Faure confirmed that the phone call took place — but his party denied any binding deal had been made.
The Parti Socialiste made its decision against censuring Lecornu in response to his opening policy speech to the National Assembly. In it, Lecornu announced a temporary freeze on the retirement-age rise, widely characterized as a “suspension” of the reform. He also ruled out using article 49.3 of the constitution — a tool extensively used by Macron’s prime ministers to pass legislation, including the pension reform, without a vote by MPs.
The result was that the National Assembly narrowly rejected the radical-left France Insoumise’s censure motion, which was backed by the other left-wing parties as well as the far-right Rassemblement National. Decisively, just seven of the Parti Socialiste’s sixty-nine MPs broke party discipline to vote against the government.
After the vote, Faure justified his party’s decision in an interview on France TV. “Sometimes you have to be responsible,” Faure said. He explained that he made the decision after Lecornu told him about his plan and ruled out using article 49.3.
“More than three million people . . . many of whom have had difficult, exhausting careers will retire earlier,” Faure added, claiming that under Lecornu’s timeline, pension-age hikes would be stopped until January 2028. That date is after the next presidential election; Faure argued that with the reform paused, the election would allow the French people to definitively settle the issue.
Listen to Faure, and the Parti Socialiste has pulled off a pretty neat trick: thanks to his party’s pragmatism and steadfastness, a hated attack on France’s social model has been put on ice. But not everybody sees things like this. Some unions and academics are deeply skeptical that opponents of the reform should be taking a victory lap.
Suspended?
While France’s largest union, the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT), celebrated the move to freeze hiking the retirement age, others in the labor movement were much less optimistic.
“In reality, the . . . announcement only delays its application by a few months,” France’s second-largest union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), said in a statement.
Following Lecornu’s announcement, economist Michaël Zemmour wrote on his blog that depending on how the government words its measure, the promised suspension would only apply to a narrow age-band of workers, born between 1964 and 1968. For slightly older workers, the damage is already done, and there are no guarantees for slightly younger workers.
After first being rammed through parliament via article 49.3, the pension reform came into effect in September 2023, starting with workers who retired in 1961. The next age hike, scheduled for 2026, will raise the retirement age for workers born in 1964, from sixty-two years and nine months to sixty-three years. Under Lecornu’s proposed timeline, that next step won’t be triggered until 2028. But a pause would do nothing to help workers who’ve already had their retirements pushed back. The preestablished timeline will then continue until 2032, at which point workers born in 1968 are subject to the raised age requirements.
In a literal sense, then, it’s inaccurate to characterize Lecornu’s offer as a “suspension” of the pension reform. If Lecornu’s offer does hold up, it would effectively mean that workers born in 1964 will be able to retire in fall 2026 instead of January 2027, per the current schedule. In no sense is the pension-age hike not still happening.
Parliamentary Trap
But will Lecornu’s promise even come close to fruition?
When Macron’s then–prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, passed the euphemistically named “reform” in 2023, her government avoided a democratic vote in the National Assembly. That was despite fierce opposition in the streets and from a majority of the population.
But Lecornu’s sleight-of-hand suspension won’t be pulled out of the same hat. Instead, the measure will be presented as an amendment to the social-security financing bill, up for examination this November.
That means that for the Parti Socialiste to accept Lecornu’s false offer of “suspending” the retirement reform, it will have to vote for this government’s next budget — all of it.
That budget is another Macron austerity package. Built on a goal of reducing the budget deficit to below 5 percent without raising taxes on the rich, it means at least €40 billion worth of cuts as well as a raft of nickel-and-diming workers and students.
Petty measures include abandoning a €500 grant for apprentices to finance driving lessons as well as getting rid of a tax exemption on their salaries. The budget also taxes employee benefits like meal checks and cultural and vacation credits at 8 percent — measures unlikely to offset the huge sums being splashed on weapons spending. In 2026, the military is getting an additional €3.5 billion over previous forecasts: a total of €6.7 billion more than was in last year’s funding bill.
On health care spending, Lecornu’s budget also follows through on a plan from previous prime minister François Bayrou’s government to crack down on sick days, for which the state covers the cost. In 2024, the government spent €17 billion on sick days, prompting Bayrou’s minister of social affairs, Catherine Vautrin (now Lecornu’s Armed Forces minister), to comment that this is encouraging a lack of “personal responsibility” from people who think they’re entitled to “free access” to coverage.
Budget Battles
Budget battles have brought down government after government since Macron’s reelection in 2022. Since then, Macron has never had a proper majority in the National Assembly and has burned through platoons of ministers to force through austerity budgets aimed at dismantling France’s social system. No-confidence motions, mostly originating from France Insoumise, have dogged every cut and “reform.” But they didn’t really start causing Macron serious problems until summer 2024’s snap parliamentary elections, which reduced his governing coalition’s numbers even further.
Macron’s first new premier after those elections, Michel Barnier, fell last December during budget negotiations. In a no-confidence vote three months into his administration, the votes of all the left-wing parties (including the Parti Socialiste) plus Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and its allies put an end to his brief reign.
Always ready to help out Macron, the Socialists tried extending a hand to work with Barnier’s successor, Bayrou, despite his plans to cut €44 billion in spending. But according to press reports, Bayrou holed himself up in his office over the summer and never reached out to negotiate with them. He then auto-defenestrated by calling a confidence vote he knew he would lose, given the obvious lack of parliamentary support for his particularly full-throated brand of austerity (Bayrou, who owns a personal home called the White House, nurses presidential ambitions for 2027).
But while the Parti Socialiste now has a more willing partner in Lecornu, it’s unrealistic to see even his meager proposition passing France’s parliament in its current form.
That’s because even if the change does make it out of the National Assembly, it will quickly founder in the Senate, which is controlled by the conservative Les Républicains.
Macron’s camp has often relied on this party’s support, especially as he’s tacked ever more to the right — Lecornu’s government has six ministers from the party, and he started his career in it too. But Les Républicains will not support every maneuver, especially this limited “suspension” of a reform they consider critical for France’s economy. A key motivation for Lecornu’s first resignation was Interior Minister Bruno Rétailleau’s threat to quit his government. Retailleau, an austere, reactionary political veteran who also has presidential ambitions for 2027, was elected Les Républicains’ party president earlier this year, promising a further rightward turn.
“[For the prime minister] to last a few more months, to scrape up a few more votes, the future is being sacrificed,” Retailleau wrote in a statement last week Wednesday, slamming Lecornu’s proposal to freeze the retirement reform. “It means more debt, but also less growth.”
Retailleau also accused Lecornu of giving the Parti Socialiste the initiative in the National Assembly. “By retreating on retirement, the signal has been given [that] any and all courageous reforms can be called into question,” Retailleau said, vowing to fight “tooth and nail” against the shift in both houses of parliament.
Indeed, the political realities in the two chambers expose the bankruptcy of the Parti Socialiste’s attempts to glean concessions from Lecornu.
During last year’s battle over the government’s budget, France Insoumise and the left-wing parties succeeded in passing a raft of amendments to the funding bill, due to mass absenteeism by members of the governmental bloc and other right-wingers. Those MPs didn’t see the point of resisting left-wing amendments because they knew they could depend on the Senate overturning any social spending that made its way through the National Assembly.
When there are differences between a budget passed by the National Assembly and one passed by the Senate, a joint committee composed of an equal number of members from both houses is thrown together to decide on a final text. Under the current composition of France’s parliament, a mixed committee will always have a majority for the neoliberal right.
Before being brought into government, Retailleau was president of Les Républicains’ Senate group, which has a majority in the upper house. If Retailleau has announced his opposition to a freeze on the pension reform, there’s a simple conclusion: the amendment won’t pass.
Far from the “suspension of the pension reform” being a real retreat or anything to savor, as some observers have painted it, Macron and Lecornu know about these realities. So does the Parti Socialiste. Why the act, then?
I wrote after the 2022 Parti Socialiste conference that the party needed to change or die. At the time, Faure was criticized from the right wing of the party for pursuing alliances with France Insoumise and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Since then, the conservative flank of the party is firmly in the driver’s seat. Faure routinely slams Mélenchon and France Insoumise with reactionary clichés. This latest gyration is just one more part of a long story where the Socialists try to maintain credibility with the Left while also presenting themselves as a responsible party of government.
“We want Macron to succeed. We want to participate in this [governing] majority,” Faure said in 2017 after Macron won his first presidential election. Pretty soon they’ll have an opportunity to do just that. But is it worth it?