PARIS - France’s President Emmanuel Macron has reappointed Sebastien Lecornu as prime minister.
Lecornu, who had stepped down from the same post on Monday, just weeks after taking office, is returning in a surprise move after days of negotiations aimed at ending a political impasse in the country.
Lecornu is tasked with forming a new cabinet, Macron’s office said in a statement on Friday.
“I accept – out of duty – the mission entrusted to me by the President of the Republic to do everything possible to provide France with a budget by the end of the year and to address the daily life issues of our fellow citizens,” Lecornu wrote on X.
“We must put an end to this political crisis that exasperates the French people and to this instability that is harmful to France’s image and its interests.”
Speaking shortly after the appointment was announced, Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler, reporting from Paris, said that “everything has been so unpredictable that nobody knew what to expect”.
“This is just the latest twist in what has been a dramatic week in French politics.”
Macron had met with leaders of all political parties apart from the far-right National Rally (RN) and the far-left France Unbowed party earlier on Friday at the presidential palace, informed sources told the AFP news agency.
Shortly before the meeting, the presidency in a statement called on all parties to recognise the “moment of collective responsibility”, appearing to imply that Macron could dissolve the French Parliament if they did not rally behind his preferred candidate.
Lecornu’s reappointment demonstrates that “clearly Macron has run out of options”, said Butler.
Following the meeting, “we heard party leaders … saying that they felt Emmanuel Macron was disconnected from what they wanted to put across on the agenda, that he didn’t understand their concerns and they felt ignored, as if the meetings had made the situation even worse,” Al Jazeera’s correspondent added.
First appointed a month ago, Lecornu, 39, had come under increasing pressure in recent weeks as he struggled to pass a budget through the fractured French Parliament amid a debt crisis.
In naming Lecornu, Macron, 47, risks the wrath of his political rivals, who have argued that the best way out of the country’s deepest political crisis in decades was for Macron to either hold snap parliamentary elections or resign.
French politics has been deadlocked ever since Macron gambled last year on snap polls that he hoped would consolidate power – but ended instead in a hung Parliament and more seats for the far right. I aje
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