Sébastien Lecornu Wants to Cut Everything but the Military
France’s new prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has had a rocky start. Yet as armed forces minister, he has already proved himself where it counts: loyally defending Emmanuel Macron’s austerity plans while pushing for ever higher military spending.
Sébastien Lecornu is a capable and unflinching executor of Emmanuel Macron’s agenda, and the president is incapable of governing with anybody who offers him anything less than that. (Ludovic Marin / AFP via Getty Images)
France’s political crisis this past week has been equal parts absurd and electrifying. On October 5, President Emmanuel Macron’s latest prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, announced a roster of ministers largely identical to the one his predecessor, François Bayrou, cobbled together last December, before falling to a no-confidence vote.
That was until the following morning, October 6, when it was announced that Lecornu had handed in his resignation already, and that the president had accepted it. Then, on October 10, following negotiations between Lecornu and political forces in search of a governing majority, Macron announced his next prime minister — Lecornu, again. Now the second Lecornu government faces the imminent threat of a confidence vote.
In the days leading up to this bathetic conclusion, Macron was filmed walking in rather agitated mood along the banks of the Seine. Rumors of the president dissolving parliament and calling another set of snap elections, or even being forced to resign, echoed loudly across Paris’s political class. Macron’s camp is far short of a majority in the National Assembly, even with right-wing allies.
“There’s every indication that Macron’s strategy is to let things deteriorate until another dissolution,” one former member of Macron’s party, Renaissance, told me before Lecornu was reappointed last Friday.
Already on his initial appointment, Lecornu was France’s third prime minister in under a year, and Macron’s fifth since being reelected in 2022. His struggle to form a minority government is the culmination of Macron’s deep autocratic impulses, which have come closer to the surface over nearly a decade in power.
Lecornu is a capable and unflinching executor of Macron’s agenda, and the president is incapable of governing with anybody who offers him anything less than that. In that sense, Macron’s behavior is indicative of the class he represents, devoted to a shock program of remilitarizing French society and dismantling the country’s social model.
The Loyal Soldier
Lecornu, a faithful ally of Macron since the beginning of the president’s political adventure, has been in his cabinet since 2018, when he was appointed minister of local planning. Before joining Macron, Lecornu was a member of Les Républicains, France’s traditional right-wing party. He managed the 2017 presidential campaign for François Fillon, a former prime minister to Nicolas Sarkozy, before a corruption scandal felled Fillon and cleared the way for Macron.
After a series of advisory positions in Macron’s governments, Lecornu became minister of overseas territories from 2020 and 2022 (where he picked up an ongoing corruption investigation for “partial and insufficient” accounting of expenses in his office). In 2022, he was appointed minister of the armed forces.
It was in this powerful and lavishly funded position that Lecornu gained a global profile, ramping up France’s military spending and promoting its powerful weapons industry.
Early this March, France’s economy minister, Éric Lombard, called for a “war economy.” He did so as France’s deficit ballooned after growth projections fell short, reigniting endless calls from the political right for austerity budgets and spending cuts. With a sluggish domestic economy, France has turned to its weapons industry for growth.
Since the beginning of 2025, only French weapons companies like Thales and Dassault have rallied on the otherwise moribund CAC 40, France’s benchmark stock index of the country’s forty highest-valued companies.
Under Lecornu’s watch, France has become the second largest arms exporter on the planet, selling just under 10 percent of the world’s weapons. That’s still far below the United States’ 43 percent of sales, but far above competitors like Russia and China.
With Lecornu in the pilot’s seat, aerospace giant Dassault aggressively increased sales to foreign countries, inking deals with Egypt, Qatar, India, Greece, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, and Serbia. Over half of Dassault’s orders are now to foreign countries, and as of summer 2024, the company was reportedly in discussions with Peru, Colombia, and Saudi Arabia. This April, the French and Indian governments finalized a deal for twenty-six Dassault Rafale fighter jets worth almost €7 billion, with plans to buy 114 more planes worth over €15 billion from France coming down the pipeline.
Business has been good for Dassault at home as well. At the end of 2024, Lecornu’s Defense Ministry ordered forty-two new fighter jets from the company at an eye-watering €5 billion price tag.
While there’s been much sound and fury over France’s debt, with interest payments set to hit €67 billion in 2026, France’s war budget has doubled since Macron was first elected. Under Bayrou’s austerity budget, ultimately rebuffed by September’s no-confidence vote, Lecornu’s Defense Ministry was one of the only ministries to receive more funding, while nearly all others faced cuts.
At the same time, aggressive steps to put France on a war footing have been put into effect.
This June, the Ministry of Health sent instructions to regional offices to be prepared by March 2026 for a “major engagement,” which could include an attack on a NATO ally that would require treating foreign soldiers in France before repatriating them to their home countries. The circular included directions to prepare medical centers to treat 100 soldiers a day for two months straight, and even 250 soldiers a day during intense three-day periods of “peaks of activity.” In all, civilian hospitals are directed to be ready to receive between 100,000 and 500,000 men in up to 120 days.
According to a National Strategic Review published by the Ministry of the Armed Forces in July, the risk of the French military being involved in a high-intensity conflict in Europe is at its highest point since the Cold War.
“[I]t is now clear that we are entering a new era, one in which there is a particularly high-intensity war in Europe, outside our national territory, involving France and its allies, particularly European ones, by 2030,” the document reads, predicting a potential attack by Russia in Moldova, the Balkans, or even a NATO member state in the next three to five years.
French generals have also reportedly pressed Lecornu to not “underestimate” the “strategic challenge” that the rise of China allegedly represents to Europe and France.
“We hope that [Macron’s] successor will continue his efforts [to raise military spending], so that the country has a strong defense by 2030,” one defense “expert” told Le Canard enchaîné in August.
On rearmament, the position of Macron’s ostensible opposition, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) isn’t too far from Macron and Lecornu’s. Over the summer, Lecornu dined with RN president Jordan Bardella, anticipating being named prime minister after Bayrou fell and hoping to come to an agreement with the RN to pass a budget.
One advisor to Marine Le Pen told me earlier this year that their differences on defense largely concern the role that Europe should play in rearmament, as the RN insists on a primary role for France’s own defense industry. Dassault currently produces three Rafales a month. Under an RN government, they say, they could double the output.
The Macron-Bayrou-Lecornu Budget
Under Macron and Lecornu, France has advanced by leaps and bounds toward a remilitarization of the economy. Now, with an unprecedented political crisis on his hands, and his popularity at a historic low, Macron could turn the same logic inward and break through the impasse to govern by decree.
According to Éric Coquerel, the France Insoumise president of the National Assembly’s Finance Commission, Macron’s delaying tactics are a smokescreen to accomplish just this.
“Macron is planning to hold a meeting of the Council of Ministers on Monday to transmit the Lecornu-Bayrou budget to the National Assembly,” Coquerel warned reporters this past Friday. “At Bercy [the Finance Ministry], they’re preparing this budget.”
According to article 47 of the constitution, if the French Parliament is unable to adopt a budget seventy days after the law is presented, it can be passed into effect by an ordonnance, or presidential decree.
With Macron abandoned by nearly all his former allies, the prospect could be attractive to the beleaguered president.
His first prime minister, Édouard Philippe, recently called for Macron to step down and hold fresh presidential elections (Philippe declared his own candidacy for the next such contest already some months ago). Even Gabriel Attal, who was Macron’s prime minister as recently as September last year, has drawn up plans to run candidates critical of the president’s record, should fresh parliamentary elections be held.
The deadline to pass a budget will run out this week. Macron trying to rule by decree would provoke another constitutional crisis that would undoubtedly require the Constitutional Council, one of France’s supreme courts, to weigh in.
In the meantime, Lecornu hasn’t resigned yet, and is trying to assemble a government. His last act in service to Macron, then, could be running out the clock.