France’s Government Has Fallen. It Really Didn’t Have To.

Opinion|France Is in Chaos. It Really Didn’t Have to Be.

He bet the house and lost.

In calling the confidence vote that brought down his government on Monday, Prime Minister François Bayrou of France has plunged the country into turmoil. He’s now the second prime minister evicted from power since last fall, when President Emmanuel Macron tapped a minority coalition of centrists and conservatives after the inconclusive snap election in the summer of 2024. Unaccustomed to paralysis of this kind, France is once again without a government.

The country can ill afford such uncertainty. Faced with a budget deficit of over 5 percent of gross domestic product, France is in dire need of flexible leadership. A self-proclaimed arbiter of fiscal responsibility, Mr. Bayrou proposed a 2026 budget that would achieve over 40 billion euros in savings, largely at the expense of the working and middle classes. He called the confidence vote in order to strong-arm Parliament into accepting it. The opposition parties, from the left and the far right, voted to unseat him instead.

This showdown was entirely avoidable. In fact, a solution to France’s fiscal and political stalemate has been hiding in plain sight: a tax on the ultrawealthy. Far from a pie in the sky, a proposal along those lines was approved by the lower house of Parliament this year. But the government and its allies, betraying their rigid approach to economic policy, scuttled it. The cost of that decision is the chaos to come.

Mr. Bayrou’s defeat was pretty much a foregone conclusion. In the absence of an agreement on his terms, he seemingly hopes to win the blame game that’s rapidly becoming the main arena of France’s fractious politics. The departing prime minister — like Mr. Macron, for that matter, who reportedly signed off on the gambit — clearly wants to pin responsibility for the impasse on the opposition’s refusal to swallow the government’s austerity plan.

In the government’s telling, France’s budget woes are the result of profligate welfare obligations, aggravated by expensive emergency spending during the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis. Mr. Bayrou’s remedy included a bitter cocktail of welfare freezes, the nonreplacement of some retiring civil servants and the scrapping of two public holidays. Its end goal was to return the country to below the European Union’s required 3 percent deficit-to-G.D.P. maximum by 2029.

The French were not convinced. Polls show that a clear majority of the public wanted Parliament to vote for Mr. Bayrou’s ouster. Frustration could soon boil over. On Wednesday a national protest movement to block everything, which gained traction this summer as Mr. Bayrou prepared his budget, is set to begin. It promises to heat up an already combustible situation.