In the early hours of Saturday morning, the French Government passed a new motion of censure, the 18th in just sixteen months, which received 193 votes in favor in the National Assembly compared to the 289 necessary to overthrow the Executive.

The motion of censure, the first of the current political course, received the support of the left and the environmentalists as well as the extreme right, but the Executive – which does not have a majority in the National Assembly – once again received the support of the conservatives of Los Republicans (LR) to move forward.

The motion came once the Prime Minister’s Executive, Élisabeth Borne, decided to approve the budgetary trajectory law until 2027, taking advantage of article 49.3 of the Constitution.

This article allows a legal text to be approved without the approval of the National Assembly – given the lack of a Government majority in the chamber – but opens the door for the opposition to present a motion of censure.

The motion was presented by the Nupes coalition – which brings together socialists, communists, environmentalists and the leftist La Francia Insumisa – and received the support of Marine Le Pen’s far-right.

The initiative was defended on Friday night in the National Assembly by the socialist deputy Philippe Brun, who stated that, despite repeated motions over the last year, the initiative “is not something anodyne.”

Brun asked for the vote to put an end to “a Government that is insensitive to the difficulties” of citizens in the face of “the immense inflationary crisis”, and that has not solved “the worsening of public services”, such as health or education.

In defense of the Government, Mathieu Lefévre, deputy of the Macronist Rennaisance party, criticized the formations that have supported the motion “from the extreme right to the extreme left”, and described them as “irresponsible” from a financial point of view for promoting policies of increased spending without compensation in income.

Of all the motions that the Borne Government has passed, the one that came closest to succeeding was the one on March 20, just after the approval without a parliamentary vote of the controversial pension reform.

That day, a handful of LR deputies joined the left and the extreme right, so that the Executive was saved by only nine votes.