PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron had three simple questions for the political leaders who gathered at the Elysée Palace last Friday in search of a solution to the most acute crisis of his tenure.

Who wants to avoid a dissolution of parliament? Will you support the government? And what are you willing to compromise on?

The answers spell trouble for the embattled president’s future after a five-day debacle that saw the resignation of Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s government just 14 hours after it was named, and culminated in his reappointment. It was a political drama the likes of which the country has rarely seen, and going into a new week it seems far from resolved.

Nothing institutionally obliged Macron to place himself at the center of the Oct. 10 talks, which Lecornu had been leading and which in hindsight appeared to have been meant to lay the groundwork for the prime minister’s renomination later that evening. When asked why his office convened the meeting, a presidential adviser joked: “Maybe he wants to win the Nobel War Prize.”

Members of the opposition who received the invitation, which was sent out at 2 a.m., mostly agreed to attend the high-stakes, closed-door meeting at the Elysée to ensure they were seen as serious about finding a negotiated solution to the impasse. 

And so the leaders of most of the country’s major political parties — except the hard-left France Unbowed and the far-right National Rally, who weren’t invited — made their way past the gates of the Elysée, up the courtyard past a throng of journalists, and into the 18th century hôtel particulier that Macron and his wife Brigitte call home. 

Before entering the Salon des Ambassadeurs, an elegant meeting room overlooking the presidential residence’s pristine terrace and impeccably manicured garden, the attendees were asked to place their phones in a box — an extra precaution to ensure no information leaked.

Macron opened his meeting with the three questions and listened attentively, according to someone in the room who, like others quoted in this piece, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Representatives from the Socialist Party refused to support Macron’s next government. The heads of Les Républicains, the conservative party that had been part of a minority government with Macron’s camp for the past year, said their support would be contingent on not touching the controversial law that raised the retirement age. Edouard Philippe, Macron’s first prime minister who leads a party that has consistently backed the president, remained mostly quiet and did not appear to commit one way or the other.

The only people to raise their hands, according to Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure, were Gabriel Attal, who leads Macron’s centrist political party, and Marc Fesneau, the president’s former agriculture minister who is part of a different centrist party.  

It was a remarkable display of Macron’s isolation.

Eight years into his presidency, with so many bridges burned and allies spurned, the gathering within the gilded walls of Salon des Ambassadeurs likely exacerbated the situation. 

Macron may have remained mostly silent throughout that meeting — he has still not publicly addressed the crisis either — but as the discussion dragged on, it became increasingly clear that Lecornu’s renomination was in the cards.

Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

Those who know the president like to compare him to an inveterate gambler who is always convinced he’s just a win away from taking down the house, no matter how many losses came before.

The problem for Macron is that his eventual decision to renominate Lecornu, which didn’t excite even supporters like Attal and Fesneau, sharpens criticism that he is committing democratic malpractice by refusing to concede power and name a PM from outside his ranks after losing last summer’s snap election.

Members of the left-leaning opposition departed Friday’s meeting “dumbfounded,” according to the head of the Greens, furious that despite Macron’s notable silence on his plans, signs were pointing to Lecornu’s reappointment.

Now Lecornu must convince lawmakers not to torpedo his government (again) and instead help him to get the country’s fractured legislature to agree to the billions of euros in cuts that are needed to rein in France’s budget deficit, which is set to hit 5.4 percent of gross domestic product this year. 

Macron and Lecornu must also reassure external observers that the world’s seventh-largest economy can pay its bills and stave off a debt crisis, questions that on Monday grew from whispers to frank conversations. After Lecornu’s resignation, the benchmark French stock index slumped as much as 3 percent on the news while 10-year borrowing costs lurched to their highest level for the year. Even the euro fell by over half a cent against the dollar.

The five days that led to Lecornu’s reappointment have changed French politics. They will leave an indelible stain on Macron’s legacy and add rocket fuel to a populist movement already enjoying unprecedented levels of support.

The consequences of what comes next are enormous, for France and for Europe.

The missed call 

For the leader of the conservatives, Bruno Retailleau, the crisis began with a missed call. Retailleau knew something was amiss when he couldn’t get hold of Lecornu on Sunday, the day the new government was set to be unveiled.

Ignoring a major player like Retailleau was a risky move given his recent meteoric rise to the halls of power, and both sides likely knew it.

After failing for most of his career to shed the bookish reputation that his short, rail-thin stature and circular glasses invited, Retailleau got a late-in-life shot at frontline politics after being named interior minister in September 2024. That was the month his party, Les Républicains, emerged from the political backwaters to join Macron’s centrists in a surprise minority coalition following summer snap elections that delivered a hung parliament. 

Retailleau’s anti-immigration bent and support for economic liberalism made him the man for the moment as France and Europe shifted to the political right. When the time came for Les Républicains, the ideological successors to Charles de Gaulle, to hold new leadership elections this year, the interior minister won in a landslide. 

Retailleau’s party had been expected to remain in government under Lecornu, who had been a member of Les Républicains until he joined Macron’s movement at its founding in 2017. During his tenure as armed forces minister before being elevated to the premiership, Lecornu reportedly enjoyed a good relationship with the conservatives.

Continuing the partnership seemed natural. So why wasn’t Lecornu picking up his phone?  

Retailleau told a small group of reporters that in the leadup to Oct. 5, the evening the doomed government was announced, he had spent a week trying extract information about the next government from the PM’s advisers.

With the clock ticking and answers elusive, Retailleau jumped in his car and headed straight to the Matignon Palace, the prime minister’s residence. When he arrived, Lecornu was surrounded by aides and looked busy.

“I told him it was urgent, and he took me aside very briefly,” Retailleau said.   

During that conversation, which lasted more than an hour and was interrupted several times by calls with the French president, Lecornu showed him a draft cabinet list. 

“There was a blank next to the armed forces,” Retailleau said. The interior minister said Lecornu responded that it was the president’s decision.

Retailleau didn’t find out until the government was unveiled on television that Macron had picked Bruno Le Maire, another Les Républicains alumnus who had jumped ship for Macron’s centrist movement, as armed forces minister. Since leaving office in 2024 Le Maire has become a scapegoat for France’s deteriorating financial health, and many in Retailleau’s camp regard the former finance minister as politically toxic. 

Macron’s camp knew Le Maire would be a controversial pick, and at least one of Lecornu’s advisers had tried to talk the president out of it an hour before. When Macron responded by saying you don’t change a government at the last minute, the adviser retorted: “An hour before Hiroshima, Hiroshima hadn’t happened.” 

For Les Républicains, Le Maire seemed to be the final straw. An adviser to Retailleau said the party “felt we’d been taken for a ride” considering Lecornu’s promise from his first day on the job to “break” with his two predecessors, who had been toppled trying to get lawmakers to agree on slimmed-down budgets.

Some minutes later, Retailleau dropped a bombshell post on X saying that his party would meet the next morning to discuss his participation in the government. The message was interpreted as a sign that he was preparing to leave. 

Lecornu resigned the next morning, and Paris joked that the conservative leader had brought down the government with a tweet.  

A walk to remember 

Lecornu has yet to give his account of this fateful meeting with Retailleau, but his office did not deny Retailleau’s account. When asked about the falling-out with Les Républicains later in the week, Lecornu merely said that discussions over the new government had not been “fluid.” He had previously blamed his government’s downfall on “partisan appetites” linked to the presidential election. 

Many centrists believe Retailleau’s outburst was driven by pressure from the more radical grassroots of the party. Others have postulated that Retailleau needed to break with Macron at some point if he wants to run for president in 2027, as he is widely expected to do. The relationship between the two men was already on the rocks after the interior minister said in an interview that Macron’s political movement would end the moment the president’s career was over.

Once the news of the resignation broke, disbelief rippled through Paris and beyond. One ambassador in the French capital got the news from an intern who piped up to say, “I think you should look at this,” while he and his advisers were leisurely planning their week.

A European Parliament adviser on the fast train to Strasbourg got a 10-minute heads-up from Paris. When his colleagues found out they opined: “What a mess.” 

The onus to do something seemed to fall on Macron, and many expected something bold. Instead, the French president went for a solitary walk on the banks of the Seine, much of the time with a phone glued to his ear.  

Cameras captured him in a dark overcoat, pacing the grey flagstones on the quais, stopping occasionally to talk to passers-by as French markets tumbled and the country panicked.

Despite the crisis, it was business as usual, an anticlimactic return to the status quo. 

Macron later attended a Légion d’honneur ceremony at the Elysée and appeared “very smiling and professional,” according to a participant.

A former adviser explained that Macron “hates being on the back foot.”

“He doesn’t like to be overtaken by events,” the adviser added.  

Bucking expectations that Macron would have to address the nation or do something dramatic, that evening the French president gave Lecornu, whose resignation he had just accepted, 48 hours to chart a path forward — an extremely unusual task for an outgoing head of government.

Abandon ship 

Macron’s allies have stuck with him through many crises, but the Lecornu debacle seemed the final straw for many.  

Gabriel Attal, one of Macron’s previous prime ministers and now the leader of his party, looked exasperated during an appearance on national television Monday night, saying he “no longer understands” the president’s decisions.

Edouard Philippe, Macron’s first prime minister and a key ally, called on Tuesday morning for the French president to step down after the 2026 budget was done. (Philippe has already declared his candidacy in the next presidential election.)  

Comments from another former PM, Elisabeth Borne, seemed to fit the bill at first. Borne, who led the government when it rammed through the unpopular measure that raised the age of retirement, came out in favor of suspending the law. She told Le Parisien in an interview published Tuesday evening that it was “important to know when to listen and move” — a jaw-dropping comment considering how she and Macron were accused of ignoring the widespread opposition to the law.  

But Borne, who had returned to government as education minister and is still very much in the loop, may have been playing another game. When considered in light of the news that Lecornu had asked the economy ministry to estimate how much it would cost to suspend the retirement reform, it suggests a willingness by Macron and Lecornu to play ball with the Socialists.

Lecornu’s two-day deadline to find a solution was up on Wednesday evening. He presented his findings to Macron at the Elysée before heading to the studios of French public broadcaster France 2 for a primetime interview.

The then-outgoing prime minister expressed optimism that a path forward, while difficult, was still possible. He hinted that Macron could name a new head of government in the next 48 hours, which the Elysée confirmed the president would do later that evening. He also tried to tamp down speculation that he’d be reappointed.  

If the Socialists had gotten their hopes up Wednesday evening, it didn’t last long. Emerging from talks with Lecornu on Thursday, party leaders complained the PM had remained sphinxlike during their conversation and dismissed talk of suspending the pensions reforms as a possible red herring. 

“Lecornu was unreadable,” said Maxime Sauvage, the Socialist Party’s National Assembly general-secretary after the meeting.  

Another Socialist official who is close to the party’s leadership said the party realized Macron wouldn’t stoop to appointing a left-wing PM because he would regard it as the “the ultimate defeat.”

“Fundamentally those around still think we are irresponsible nitwits,” the official said.  

The flirt with the Socialists seemed to leave Retailleau and his conservatives cornered, grappling with the possibility that a week that began with a tantrum over the composition of the government could end with Macron’s handing power to the left. Retailleau and another powerful conservative, Senate President Gérard Larcher, tried in vain to convince them to nominate Jean-Louis Borloo, a center-right former minister who had been out of politics for more than a decade. 

A close ally of the president last week described the strategy as one of brinkmanship. But Macron has been in office for eight years now, and everyone knows of his tendency to play politics like a game of poker.

Few were surprised when the president called party leaders to the Elysée to close out the week and then, for the duration of the meeting, kept his cards close to his chest, reportedly offering a limited concession on retirement form and then reappointing Lecornu hours later. 

Macron’s tragedy 

The tragedy for Emmanuel Macron is that time has proven him right on several proposals that seemed controversial at first, especially in the realm of geopolitics.

Macron started pushing as early as 2017 for a strategically autonomous Europe Union, making the bloc more self-sufficient economically and in defense. He was also widely panned for talking about European boots on the ground in Ukraine a year before the formation of the Franco-British coalition of the willing. 

“Not many leaders are willing and able to think five or even two years ahead,” an EU diplomat said. “He was so good at doing that.” 

Perhaps time will prove him right on retirement reform, as France’s population grays and the economics of the pension system become more untenable as more baby boomers retire.  

It matters little in the short term.  

The week’s chaos was a gift to the far right and to Le Pen, its longtime leader, who claims mainstream political parties are out of touch and have driven France to the edge of collapse. 

Le Pen and her party are calling for snap elections, despite questions over whether she could even run in the contest after being found guilty of embezzlement earlier this year. She has denied wrongdoing and an appeal trial is set for January.

Lecornu’s odds of failure, with the Socialist Party still wielding the threat of a no-confidence vote, seem higher than ever before. Should he be toppled, Macron may be left with no other choice but to send voters back to the ballot box at a time when European populists are racking up victories from Prague to Portugal.

Though France’s two-round runoff system makes it difficult to predict how polling translates into wins at the ballot box, one recent survey showed that in a hypothetical new legislative election, nearly 50 percent of voters would opt for the extremes at either end of the political spectrum. The National Rally is currently polling at around 33 percent (a level similar to what it got in last year’s legislative election), making it the country’s most popular political party.

The far right’s policies may be controversial, but their summation of the political situation is not.

“The Lecornu II government,” said National Rally President Jordan Bardella, “is a bad joke, a democratic disgrace, and a humiliation for the French people.”  

Sarah Paillou, Victor Goury-Laffont, Tim Ross, Geoffrey Smith and Anthony Lattier contributed to this report.