Michel Barnier’s government was defeated after 331 deputies against him, marking him the shortest-lived Prime Minister in modern French political history.
Paris: The government in France collapsed yesterday after legislators from both sides of the political spectrum found common ground in voting a vote of no-confidence against that country’s Prime Minister, Michel Barnier. This drove the European Union’s second-largest economic power further into chaos, threatening to worsen its budget and looming economic crisis.
Before the vote, the prime minister addressed the country, saying it was his privilege to serve France and its people with dignity. He had been in office for two months and 29 days. With the vote of confidence against him, Mr Barnie will now have to tender his resignation—that of his government—to President Emmanuel Macron, making his minority government’s tenure the shortest lived in France’s Fifth Republic beginning in 1958.
According to French media reports, he is expected to do so on Thursday morning. The Elysee Palace said the president will then address the nation at 1900 GMT.
A minority of 331 legislators who voted against him in the lower house, Michel Bernier’s government resigned. Only 288 had been required to pass a no-confidence motion in a 577-member chamber; only the third no-confidence motion and the first successful one that had ever been passed after another defeat of Georges Pompidou’s government in 1962, when then President Charles de Gaulle was at the helm.
