Gabriel Attal’s government has yet to be named, but it is already threatened by a motion of censure that the elected representatives of La France insoumise plan to table if the Prime Minister refuses to comply with the vote of confidence.
The Attal government has not yet seen the light of day and there is already a threat hanging over it: that of a motion of censure. Gabriel Attal had officially been Prime Minister for only a few minutes when the president of the group of rebellious deputies in the National Assembly, Mathilde Panot, demanded that the new head of government submit to a vote of confidence, otherwise the elected representatives of La France insoumise “will table[t] a motion of censure”.
This threat of the motion of censure was mentioned the day before the appointment of the Prime Minister by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “Are we still a parliamentary democracy? The new Prime Minister will show us if he asks for a vote of confidence in the National Assembly. Otherwise, motion of censure and we will know who the opposition is” he wrote in the evening on X, formerly Twitter.
But La France insoumise is the only opposition group to support the vote for a motion of censure against the government not yet formed. The other left-wing forces did ask for a vote of confidence, a “republican tradition” according to Olivier Faure, first secretary of the Socialist Party, but none mentioned a motion of censure and none took a position on the declarations of the Insoumis . The socialist only pleaded for a general policy speech to be delivered by the Prime Minister, a speech considered “the least of things” by the boss of the French Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, in order to justify the “reasons for the reshuffle” .
And what does the far right think of the motion of censure? The National Rally has not officially made a decision regarding the vote on a possible motion, but for the moment there would be no question of supporting the text. “I don’t think the French want us to censor a priori a government which has not yet done or announced anything,” said RN MP Jean-Philippe Tanguy this Wednesday on France Inter.
