00:09He can do that. He may not do that. Where does that leave us? What does this mean for his government?
00:17Scott, things are a little bit clearer now than they were earlier today, but not much.
00:22What we know is that the theory that fresh elections could be called for the National Assembly looks less likely than it did this morning, for example.
00:39and take the next spin on this wheel that we've been on since June of last year of trying to build a minority coalition in Parliament that's able to pass a French budget.
00:50Now, he did this after the 48 hours of intense consultations with political leaders from across the political spectrum, not all parties, but most.
00:59And what he was trying to do was see if among those groups he could find enough support for central ideas that he believes that could lead to a budget.
01:09Essentially, he wants somebody else to take the reins from here. That's what he's told the President Emmanuel Macron.
01:24He now expects the President to name somebody else to take on the job, to lead those discussions.
01:30He was asked repeatedly, should it be a candidate from the left party? He said it's up to the President to decide.
01:35Should it be a technocratic Prime Minister? It's up to the President to decide.
01:39He has made it clear, though, that nobody who's going to be in this government should have presidential ambitions for the 2027 presidential election.
01:47It looks like he's pointing towards a sort of technocratic arrangement, but very much involving the politicians who are in the National Assembly now,
01:55who are on the political scene, to be able to put that compromise together, because they have some pretty big issues.
02:01They have to decide. And the calendar on this budget is already running very, very tight.
02:07So the rush is to try and get something done in time that can be passed through Parliament and actually keep the public finances running over into next year,
02:15avoiding the sort of emergency measures that we saw at the end of last year, which, as we know, didn't go down very well on the bond markets.
02:22Can investors force the hand of the centrist parties who must decide whether to play ball with Le Corneau or, for that matter, Macron?
02:29Look, that's a really good question, because what we've seen so far is a little bit of tension in markets,
02:36but not something that our own economists or any of the market analysts that we've been speaking to would describe as a fiscal or financial crisis in France.
02:43This is still a political crisis. We have seen the spread of bond yields between France and Germany widen,
02:50although it did actually tighten a little bit today when Le Corneau signaled this morning that he had been making some progress in these talks.
02:56Yes. Realistically, looking at it for markets right now, nothing's really changed in the past week or really since the middle of the summer
03:04when the last prime minister, Francois Beirut, proposed his budget.
03:08They're still in this phase of negotiation. There are still signals that a compromise could be found.
03:14When markets will run out of patience with France is very much an open question.
03:18You don't have the cliff edge of a government shutdown in France in the way that you do in the United States,
03:23because the way it works is the system runs into sort of keeping the lights on measures where taxes are collected and public services operated.
03:30That's not a situation any politicians want to be happening. It's not a situation the public wants to happen either.
03:36But the cliff edge moment looks that little bit further away, at least for now.
03:40The situation that markets were most worried about is what fresh elections could produce, National Assembly elections,
03:47or in an extreme case, a fresh presidential election.
03:50Both of those look off the cards this evening, but things are moving very quickly.
03:54And who Emmanuel Macron could pick in 48 hours' time is going to be a very interesting question.
04:00So very quickly, if legislative elections would be unsettling to investors,
04:04I'm guessing that presidential elections, Macron actually resigning, as some in the opposition parties want him to do,
04:11is not something investors would welcome.
04:15No, indeed. I mean, that would be a much more dramatic shift in France's both fiscal approach
04:20and some of those big, heavy issues like the pension reforms, which is the central thing politicians here are fighting over at the moment.
04:27If that were to be disrupted, that would change the fiscal perceptions of France.
04:31We've also got some ratings agency decisions to look out for, too.
04:34A presidential election would be very dramatic.
04:36A National Assembly election would be less dramatic.
04:38And getting a new prime minister, well, that could produce another shrug from markets.
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