By Dominique Vidalon and Benjamin Mallet
PARIS (Reuters) -President Emmanuel Macron will convene a meeting of France’s mainstream political parties on Friday ahead of a self-imposed deadline to name a new prime minister, as the country’s central bank chief warned the political crisis was curbing growth.
Macron is searching for his sixth prime minister in under two years and will need to find a personality whose appeal spans the centre-right to centre-left in order to steer a budget through a fragmented and fractured parliament.
The president’s office said late on Wednesday that he would name his next prime minister within 48 hours.
The meeting – which does not include the far-right National Rally or the hard-left France Unbowed, two of the National Assembly’s largest political parties – is due to take place from 1230 GMT.
FORMER PM CALLS FOR COMPROMISE
Speculation in political circles has centred upon veteran centrist Jean-Louis Borloo, head of the public auditor Pierre Moscovici, and Sebastien Lecornu, who resigned as prime minister on Monday and appeared to rule himself out of contention.
“Being prime minister is not a question of desire. It’s a job that is very difficult today,” Moscovici told broadcaster BFM. “If the question is posed, you respond. It has never been asked of me.”
Marine Tondelier and Gabriel Attal, two party heads, both confirmed they would attend the meeting.
“People tell me: ‘He’s going to test the Lecornu 2 hypothesis on you.’ If that’s the case, I wish him good luck,” Green party chief Tondelier told TF1 television.
Attal said he hoped the president had called the meeting to listen to the various political parties, not merely to tell them what he had decided.
“It’s necessary first to speak and find a compromise among the political parties, because I fear again that trying the same method … of naming a prime minister before there has been a compromise at the root will produce the same effects,” Attal, the head of a centrist party and one of Macron’s former prime ministers, said in an interview with France 2 television.
CRISIS IMPACTS GROWTH
France, the euro zone’s second-largest economy, is mired in its deepest political crisis in decades, turmoil in part precipitated by the president’s failed gamble on a snap election last year which weakened further his minority in parliament.
The country’s central bank chief, Francois Villeroy de Galhau, forecast the political uncertainty would cost the economy 0.2 percentage points of gross domestic product. Business sentiment was suffering but the economy was broadly fine, he said.
“Uncertainty is … the number one enemy of growth,” Villeroy told RTL radio.
Fraught budget negotiations this year and last as France seeks to rein in its public finances and tame a gaping budget deficit have cost Macron three prime ministers in less than 12 months.
Villeroy said it would be preferable if the deficit did not exceed 4.8% of GDP in 2026. The deficit is forecast to hit 5.4% this year, nearly double the European Union’s cap. Macron’s second-to-last prime minister, Francois Bayrou, was ousted by the National Assembly over his plans for 44 billion euros in savings to haul the deficit to 4.6%.
Rating agencies issued a fresh round of warnings about France’s sovereign credit score this week after Lecornu said his government was resigning just 14 hours after he had announced his cabinet line-up.
(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon and Benjamin Mallet; Writing by Richard Lough; Editing by Makini Brice and Alison Williams)
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