French Government Falls After No-Confidence Vote

We're getting a result right now. The French government falls after no confidence vote in a parliament. The French no confidence motion passes with 331 votes.

288 were needed. Not too surprising given how closely you followed this, but what's your immediate reaction? I mean, look, it means there wasn't any defections.

Michel Barnier has called for responsibility, Doesn't seem to have won over any of the MPs. He was hoping it was particularly targeting the centre left party, the Socialist Party, who've been in government in France many times in recent history. The question of whether or not some of those parliaments might be willing to abstain, for example, from this vote to try and save the government.

He doesn't seem to have convinced them with this message. That's the number in and around what we expected, because it's basically if you add together the left wing alliance, Amara, Le Pen's far right national rally those parties put together gave us that total of in and around 330. So it looks like they didn't manage to convince anyone to cross the line.

It's a result that's pretty much then in line with expectations, but now opens up the question of what happens next. What will Emmanuel Macron do? He's just landed back in France in the past few minutes from a visit to Saudi Arabia where he was trying to brush off a lot of these press, go questions at home and continue on with international affairs to little avail, as everyone just wants to ask him what he planned to do after this vote went through.

He had been asked on many occasions whether or not he might resign, and he says that's not an issue. It's not even in question that he would do that. Of course, his term runs till 2027.

So we now set ourselves up for the timeline where the French president can take as long as he likes to appoint a new government. We don't think he's going to leave it that long, but it does plunges into a sort of political vacuum now. We'll have to have a caretaker government to keep current affairs running, but it's going to make those big challenges like dealing with the budget even more difficult.

Stephen, do we have a good idea of who would likely be the next prime minister and what that new government would look like? We don't. There are a couple of names that have been floated around, but it's not a specific list of people that have been floated.

You could imagine that Emmanuel Macron would try and pick from, if not his own political family, those who've already said that they would ally with him. There had been a question before Michel Barnier was picked as to whether he might be able to pick a politician from the Socialist Party. That centre left party and thus bring them into this centre alliance that he was trying to create.

But they couldn't agree between the left wing parties on the same candidate that Emmanuel Macron wanted that was bound. Now, Cazeneuve, who is a former interior minister, he was the one who had been mentioned last time around. This was in the discussions that led up to Michel Barnier being picked.

But the names that are out there now are in the realm of speculation. There's no rallied support around someone. There is no obvious candidate for who would take over because the challenge facing the person who takes on that is they have the same parliamentary maths to deal with.

Michel Barnier was dealt a very difficult hand. He didn't have a majority in Parliament. He did his best to try and build a way of working.

He always said that he was leaving it to Parliament to be able to legislate and negotiate on important matters. That's failed. You have to ask who would be brave enough to step into those shoes because it's a pretty nasty hand of cards, to be honest.

That's exactly where I want to go. We're getting some commentary from France unbowed lawmaker Matilda Pano, who says that, quote, Finally, the Barnier government has fallen along with its violent budget. Today is a historic day.

What does a budget look like in France after this process? Well, look, we go into this situation where we're going to be going month to month from January. There is there is very little hope that even if a government was formed tomorrow, that they would be able to resuscitate this current budget plan and actually guess anything in place by the end of the year.

So either way, when it comes to the end, the 31st of December, we're rolling in to this as those minimum service French states, that's going to be in place from January of next year. And that's going to bring back in those questions around tax rises for a lot of households who are paying income tax, those rises for pensions as well. And there were specific things like extra financial aid for farmers, which now won't be paid out because that won't go into the budget bill.

So the next immediate step is that there will be a motion that'll need to be passed in Parliament to, I suppose, activate this temporary measures to keep the state running the lights on, if you will. There's not expected to be any major opposition to that because no French politician wants to be responsible for, you know, no welfare payments being paid early next year. So there's not an expectation that we will have anything but this month to month situation operating from January with a larger budget deficit and with the pressure that's going to push on France's borrowing costs and international markets as well.