French election winners move to impeach Macron

The LFI party argues that democracy should be protected from “the president’s authoritarian leanings”

France’s left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI) party has circulated a motion and is gathering co-signatures to remove President Emmanuel Macron from office after he refused to appoint the coalition’s candidate as prime minister.

LFI is part of the New Popular Front alliance (NFP) along with the Socialists, Communists, and Greens, which emerged as the winner of the snap parliamentary elections called by Macron earlier this year. However, the coalition fell short of an outright majority, forcing Macron to enter negotiations to appoint a new prime minister and form a government. On Monday, the French leader rejected NFP’s candidate, Lucie Castets, for the post, arguing that a left-wing government would threaten “institutional stability.”

“The draft resolution to initiate the procedure for the impeachment of the President of the Republic, in accordance with Article 68 of the Constitution, was sent today to parliamentarians for co-signatures,” the LFI’s parliamentary leader, Mathilde Panot, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday.

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To initiate the impeachment process, the LFI group, which has 72 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, must collect signatures from at least one-tenth of the members of parliament under its motion. Article 68 of the French Constitution stipulates that the action could be implemented “in the event of a breach of duty manifestly incompatible with the exercise of his mandate.”

“Macron refuses to submit to the people’s vote, so we must dismiss him,” Panot explained, sharing the draft of the resolution, which stated that “the National Assembly (lower house) and Senate can and must defend democracy against the president’s authoritarian leanings.”

The lawmakers argued that it is not up to the president “to do political horse trading,” referring to Macron’s struggle to find a new prime minister since accepting Gabriel Attal’s resignation last month.

Meanwhile, the French media noted that it would be hard to find a new PM “who would not be immediately ousted in a confidence vote.”

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Macron called a snap election in June after his centrist Ensemble bloc’s poor showing at the European polls. After the first round of the domestic vote saw Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally (RN) as the frontrunner, Macron reached a last-minute “strategic voting” deal with the NFP to prevent the RN from securing majority in the National Assembly. 

Despite Macron’s bloc coming second in the elections, the president has the sole power to name the prime minister, who is not formally required to be a candidate from the winning party.

The RN, which came third in the National Assembly vote, stated that it would block any candidate from the left-wing alliance, arguing that the NFP represents “a danger to public order, civil peace, and obviously to the economic life of the country.”