PARIS (AP) — Another prime minister gone. Another crisis unfolding. In France, what once shocked is now routine.
Prime Minister François Bayrou submitted his resignation Tuesday after losing a crushing confidence vote in parliament. The third toppling of a head of government in 14 months leaves President Emmanuel Macron scrambling for a successor and a nation caught in a cycle of collapse.
Bayrou, 74, lasted just nine months in office. Even that was three times longer than his predecessor.
He gambled on a budget demanding over €40 billion in savings. The plan froze welfare, cut civil-service jobs, and even scrapped two public holidays that many French see as part of their national rhythm.
Bayrou warned that without action the national debt, which is now 114% of GDP, would bring “domination by creditors” as surely as by foreign powers.
Instead, he united his enemies. The far right of Marine Le Pen and a left-wing alliance voted him down, 364 to 194. By the time lawmakers cast their ballots, Bayrou already had invited allies to a farewell drink.
The president has promised to name a new prime minister “in the coming days.” It will be his fourth in under two years.
There are several possible replacements, among them: Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu, Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin, former Socialist premier Bernard Cazeneuve and Finance Minister Eric Lombard.
Speculation has grown around Lombard, who has roots in Socialist governments, as Macron considers a leftward shift in order to secure a strong enough coalition.
But the problem is not the personnel. It is the arithmetic.
Whoever takes the job will face the same trap that consumed Bayrou: Pass a budget in a parliament that cannot agree.
Since Macron’s snap election in 2024, parliament has been split into three rival blocs: far left, centrists, and far right. None commands a majority. France has no tradition of coalition-building and every budget becomes a battle.
But Macron’s room to maneuver is shrinking and new elections could hand Le Pen even greater power. Le Pen, convicted of embezzlement and barred from office for five years, is appealing her sentence from January. In the meantime, she promotes her protégé Jordan Bardella as a ready prime minister — a scenario Macron has every reason to avoid.
The president has ruled out another election for now, but Le Pen insists he must call one. Leftist firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon has urged a rewrite of the Constitution to weaken what he calls a “presidential monarchy.”
With just 18 months left in his term-limited presidency and his approval rating at 15%, the risk for Macron is existential. Even fresh calls for his resignation can be heard, though Macron has ruled it out.
France is the eurozone’s second-largest economy, its only nuclear power and a permanent United Nations Security Council member. Prolonged instability reverberates far beyond its borders.
France’s political difficulty weakens Europe’s hand against Russia. It rattles investors and undermines the credibility of EU fiscal rules.
At home, it chips away at trust in the state itself. France’s welfare system — pensions, health care, education — is not just policy. It is identity. Each attempt to trim the structure feels like an assault on the model of solidarity that defines modern France.
On Monday night, about 11,000 demonstrators feted Bayrou's ouster outside town halls in “Bye Bye Bayrou” farewell drinks.
Some came for celebration. Many stayed to organize.
Wednesday has been declared a day of action under the slogan “Block Everything.” Protesters plan to shut fuel depots, highways, and city centers. The government is deploying 80,000 police.
France has seen mass uprisings before: pensions in 2023, the Yellow Vests in 2018. The current movement echoes the latter, which at their peak brought France to a standstill. Analysts warn that if Macron once again ignores popular discontent, unrest could spiral.
But this time the anger runs perhaps deeper. It is not just about one reform. It is about austerity, inequality and the sense that governments keep collapsing while nothing changes.
The numbers are stark. France’s deficit stands at nearly 6% of GDP, which is about €198 billion. EU rules demand it be cut below 3%.
Bayrou’s cure was cuts that fell on workers and retirees. Voters saw this as unfair. After years of tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, patience has snapped.
Earlier this year, the lower house passed a rich tax proposal — a 2% levy on fortunes above €100 million. It would have hit fewer than 2,000 households but raised €25 billion annually. Yet Macron’s pro-business allies, historically wary of scaring off investment, killed it in the Senate.
Bayrou pressed on with cuts that hit the working and middle classes the most.
For many, the contrast was glaring: austerity for millions, protection for billionaires.
Four prime ministers in under two years. A debt crisis grinding the economy. A nation paralyzed by political deadlock. It sounds like France today. In fact, it was France in the late 1950s, when the Fourth Republic collapsed under the weight of drift and division.
Charles de Gaulle built the Fifth Republic, bolstering the presidency to end the revolving-door governments of the Fourth. The new constitution gave the president powers to dissolve parliament, call referendums and appoint the prime minister.
Seven decades later, the system designed to guarantee stability is confronting the same storm.
Gabriel Attal, himself a fallen premier, calls the current cycle of collapse “an absolutely distressing spectacle” and has urged the appointment of a coalition mediator — a role France’s system wasn't supposed to need. His warning is stark: No republic can keep discarding leaders every few months without threatening its survival.
French politics is fractured into three hostile camps. With no tradition of compromise, unlike Germany or Italy, stalemate has become the rule.
“The question posed now is that of the survival of our political system,” political analyst Alain Duhamel told Le Monde. “In 1958 there was an alternative in the form of de Gaulle. Like him or detest him, he unquestionably had a project.”
Today, there is no de Gaulle. Only an embattled president, a divided parliament, and a Republic waiting to prove it can still hold.
Associated Press journalist Masha Macpherson contributed to this report.
France's President Emmanuel Macron, right, shakes hand with France's Prime Minister Francois Bayrou during the farewell ceremony of Chief of Staff of the French Armed Forces Thierry Burkhard, in the courtyard of the Invalides, in Paris, France, Friday, Sept. 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena, Pool)
FILE - French President Emmanuel Macron arrives to speak after attending a video conference with members of the so-called "coalition of the willing", Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025 at the Fort de Bregancon in Bormes-les-Mimosas, southern France. (AP Photo/Philippe Magoni, Pool, File)
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Pessimism about the country's future has risen in cities since last year, but rural America is more optimistic about what's ahead for the U.S., according to a new survey from the American Communities Project.
And despite President Donald Trump’s insistence that crime is out of control in big cities, residents of the nation’s largest metropolitan centers are less likely to list crime and gun violence among the chief concerns facing their communities than they were a couple years ago.
Optimism about the future is also down from last year in areas with large Hispanic communities.
These are some of the snapshots from the new ACP/Ipsos survey, which offers a nuanced look at local concerns by breaking the nation’s counties into community types, using data points like race, income, age and religious affiliation. The survey evaluated moods and priorities across the 15 different community types, such as heavily Hispanic areas, big cities and different kinds of rural communities.
The common denominator across the communities? A gnawing worry about daily household costs.
“Concerns about inflation are across the board,” said Dante Chinni, founder and director of ACP. “One thing that truly unites the country is economic angst.”
Rural residents are feeling more upbeat about the country's trajectory — even though most aren't seeing Trump's promised economic revival.
The $15 price tag on a variety pack of Halloween candy at the Kroger supermarket last month struck Carl Gruber. Disabled and receiving federal food aid, the 42-year-old from Newark, Ohio, had hardly been oblivious to lingering, high supermarket prices.
But Gruber, whose wife also is unable to work, is hopeful about the nation's future, primarily in the belief that prices will moderate as Trump suggests.
“Right now, the president is trying to get companies who moved their businesses out of the country to move them back,” said Gruber, a Trump voter whose support has wavered over the federal shutdown that delayed his monthly food benefit. “So, maybe we'll start to see prices come down.”
About 6 in 10 residents of Rural Middle America — Newark's classification in the survey — say they are hopeful about the country's future over the next few years, up from 43% in the 2024 ACP survey. Other communities, like heavily evangelical areas or working-class rural regions, have also seen an uptick in optimism.
Kimmie Pace, a 33-year-old unemployed mother of four from a small town in northwest Georgia, said, “I have anxiety every time I go to the grocery store.”
But she, too, is hopeful in Trump. “Trump’s in charge, and I trust him, even if we’re not seeing the benefits yet,” she said.
By contrast, the share of big-city residents who say they are hopeful about the nation's future has shrunk, from 55% last year to 45% in the new survey.
Robert Engel of San Antonio — Texas' booming, second most-populous city — is worried about what's next for the U.S., though less for his generation than the next. The 61-year-old federal worker, whose employment was not interrupted by the government shutdown nor Trump's effort to reduce the federal workforce, is near retirement and feels financially stable.
A stable job market, health care availability and a fair economic environment for his adult children are his main priorities.
Recently, the inflation outlook has worsened under Trump. Consumer prices in September increased at an annual rate of 3%, up from 2.3% in April, when the president first began to roll out substantial tariff increases that burdened the economy with uncertainty.
Engel's less-hopeful outlook for the country is broader. “It's not just the economy, but the state of democracy and polarization,” Engel said. “It's a real worry. I try to be cautiously optimistic, but it's very, very hard.”
Trump had threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, to fight what he said was runaway, urban crime.
Yet data shows most violent crime in those places, and around the country, has declined in recent years. That tracks with the poll, which found that residents of America's Big Cities and Middle Suburbs are less likely to list crime or gun violence among the top issues facing their communities than they were in 2023.
For Angel Gamboa, a retired municipal worker in Austin, Texas, Trump's claims don't ring true in the city of roughly 1 million people.
“I don't want to say it's overblown, because crime is a serious subject," Gamboa said. “But I feel like there's an agenda to scare Americans, and it's so unnecessary.”
Instead, residents of Big Cities are more likely to say immigration and health care are important issues for their communities.
Big Cities are one of the community types where residents are most likely to say they’ve seen changes in immigration recently, with 65% saying they’ve seen a change in their community related to immigration over the past 12 months, compared with only about 4 in 10 residents of communities labeled in the survey as Evangelical Hubs or Rural Middle America.
Gamboa says he has witnessed changes, notably outside an Austin Home Depot, where day laborers regularly would gather in the mornings to find work.
Not anymore, he said.
“Immigrants were not showing up there to commit crimes," Gamboa said. "They were showing up to help their families. But when ICE was in the parking lot, that's all it took to scatter people who were just trying to find a job.”
After Hispanic voters moved sharply toward Trump in the 2024 election, the poll shows that residents of heavily Hispanic areas are feeling worse about the future of their communities than they were before Trump was elected.
Carmen Maldonado describes her community of Kissimmee, Florida, a fast-growing, majority-Hispanic city of about 80,000 residents about 22 miles (35 kilometers) south of Orlando, as “seriously troubled.”
The 61-year-old retired, active-duty National Guard member isn't alone. The survey found that 58% of residents of such communities are hopeful about the future of their community, down from 78% last year.
“It's not just hopelessness, but fear,” said Maldonado, who says people in her community — even her fellow native Puerto Ricans, who are American citizens — are anxious about the Trump administration's aggressive pursuit of Latino immigrants.
Just over a year ago, Trump made substantial inroads with Hispanic voters in the 2024 presidential election.
Beyond just the future of their communities, Hispanic respondents are also substantially less likely to say they’re hopeful about the future of their children or the next generation: 55% this year, down from 69% in July 2024.
Maldonado worries that the Trump administration's policies have stoked anti-Hispanic attitudes and that they will last for her adult child's lifetime and beyond.
“My hopelessness comes from the fact that we are a large part of what makes up the United States,” she said, “and sometimes I cry thinking about these families.”
Parwani and Thomson-DeVeaux reported from Washington.
The American Communities Project/Ipsos Fragmentation Study of 5,489 American adults aged 18 or older was conducted from Aug. 18 - Sept. 4, 2025, using the Ipsos probability-based online panel and RDD telephone interviews. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 1.8 percentage points.
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach Fla., on his way back to the White House, Sunday, Nov. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
