Looking For France On the International Stage

France’s international presence is crucial at a time when the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ wishes to remain at the negotiating table with the US, Russia and Ukraine. However, the political instability on France’s home front threatens to undercut France’s foreign policy, at this decisive moment of the war in Ukraine and in turbulent international times. This past week, the French domestic political landscape sharply darkened, as political actors from all sides predict a vote of no confidence against President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Prime Minister, François Bayrou. Indeed, two weeks ago, in a desperate bid ostensibly to get ahead of a difficult vote on the budget in Parliament this autumn, Bayrou unexpectedly announced that a confidence vote would be held today, 8 September.

In all the possible scenarios outlined below, France’s longstanding engagements abroad will be severely weakened, if not paused. As a result, France’s partners – including Germany and the UK – will bear an additional, unnecessary burden.

France’s Insulated Foreign Policy

France’s foreign policy has historically been relatively insulated from both domestic politics and public opinion. Foreign policy is customarily the ‘domaine réservé’ of the president and therefore tends to be immune to parliamentary volatility. In addition, career diplomats are ‘hauts fonctionnaires’ who tend to be deeply embedded within the fabric of the state and are typically left to conduct their work with little public scrutiny. A report prepared in 2025 for the French Development Agency (AFD) found that 95% of French people saw security questions as ‘important’, but only 67% of them saw security as a ‘top priority,’ ranking behind ‘countering terrorism and extremism’.

Until now, this relative insularity of foreign policy has meant there have been few instances where domestic turmoil undermined France’s diplomatic engagements. Most memorably, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou abridged an official visit to Iran and Afghanistan in May 1968, when student protests in Paris threatened General de Gaulle’s presidency. And in March 2023, President Macron delayed King Charles III’s visit to France after protests against pension reforms rocked the country.

Now, the future of President Macron’s foreign policy following the confidence vote is uncertain: he could nominate a new prime minister, call a new parliamentary election or even resign altogether. In the first two cases, he may not have the political capital or the budgetary flexibility to exercise his traditional ‘domaine réservé’. In the third case, the candidate to succeed him and the foreign policy they would seek to implement is anyone’s guess.

Three Scenarios, One Damaged Foreign Policy

President Macron, broadly speaking, faces three scenarios if Parliament votes against his prime minister: continuation, cohabitation or resignation. All three scenarios imply reduced or halted French foreign engagements.

• Continuation: The president could name a prime minister from a ‘moderate’ political formation – centre-left, centre or centre-right – prolonging the fragile status quo which has been in place since he last dissolved Parliament in June 2024. The president would continue to intervene on crucial questions such as Ukraine and Gaza, but he would continually be hindered by diverging factions within his government, a lack of majority in Parliament, and the difficulty of deploying any support abroad without controlling the levers of the national budget. This precarious balance would not only leave the president as a ‘lame duck’: all French foreign engagement would be overshadowed by the possibility of a sudden governmental collapse or parliamentary dissolution.
• Cohabitation: The president may also choose to nominate a prime minister from an opposition party such as Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella’s far-right Rassemblement national (RN), resulting in the ‘cohabitation’ of two distant political families within one government. Alternatively, the president could dissolve Parliament and trigger an election. In such an event, the RN is positioned to lead the polls, followed closely by a coalition of left-wing parties; this too could result in a cohabitation. The RN has historically been ambivalent, or at the very least timid, about the war in Ukraine. In March 2025, Le Pen declared to Parliament ‘it is incontestable that we should support Ukraine’, but added that she would ‘never support a fantastical European defence’ [une chimérique défence européenne]. A cohabitation between President Macron and a prime minister from the RN – or from another opposition party – would send a muddled message on Ukraine and make it difficult for a coherent foreign policy to emerge on subjects as divisive as Gaza, China and the transatlantic alliance with the US.

• Resignation: President Macron’s most radical option would be to resign the presidency after seven years of declining support, succumbing to pressures from all sides and to what will inevitably be interpreted as another vote contre sa personne.

  Ever since the ‘yellow vests’ protests began in 2018, the French media have periodically speculated about the president’s possible resignation. Keen observers have repeatedly pointed to the precedent set by General de Gaulle in 1969, when he resigned after a failed referendum on the ‘creation of regions and renewal of the Senate’. But Macron is not in the same position today as de Gaulle was then: the General had entered history as a victor of the Second World War, had governed France for over a decade, and was nearly 80 years old when he resigned. Above all, he resigned out of a profound respect for the Constitution that he created and the people that elected him. France had firmly said ‘no’: it was time to go.

  By contrast, were President Macron to resign now, he would leave behind an unremarkable legacy, and risk being, essentially, the president who opened the floodgates to the ‘extremes’. The president’s resignation would also generate complete uncertainty about France’s foreign policy. The one-month transition period specified by the Constitution – during which the president of the Senate would ensure the interim and early presidential elections are held – would mean the disappearance of France from high-level negotiations between heads of state, and crucially, a lack of direction as to France’s foreign policy. Would French diplomats do nothing until a new president is elected, awaiting receipt of further instruction? Would Presidents Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ continue negotiations without France?

  If France were to survive this transition month without falling out of the loop, its foreign policy would still be in the hands of a new president. A presidential election could designate any candidate, ranging from isolationist to interventionist to indifferent.

All three scenarios described above imply severe negative effects for France’s foreign policy, and indeed, for its international stature. In a famous speech given in Athens in 1959, de Gaulle’s Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux, asserted that France is ‘never greater than when it is great for all mankind’. At present, France struggles to even stand on its own two feet. Its public spending deficit attained 5.8% of GDP in 2024, and the prospect of the IMF intervening to salvage France’s economy is regularly debated.

Disappearance From the International Stage?

France’s never-ending debate about its malaise, ailment, suicide or variation thereof has recently gone eerily quiet. Perhaps political observers have quietly resigned themselves to the country’s fate. De Gaulle himself reflected on the same question, asking his confidant Alain Peyrefitte in 1962: ‘Will France decline, too? Will it climb back up the hill? … In one thousand years of history, it has known highs and lows, it has shown the world that it was a great people, and it has now wallowed in its mud.’ In June 1940, during the Second World War, the General had experienced the country’s worst crisis when the French State signed an armistice with Nazi Germany. , Then, the UK helped save France’s honour by supporting de Gaulle’s Free French as an allied force. 85 years later, no foreign country can save France’s honour. The country must save itself.

© RUSI, 2025.

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