By Elizabeth Pineau and Michel Rose
PARIS (Reuters) -French lawmakers prepared to oust the government with a no-confidence motion on Wednesday, plunging the euro zone's second-biggest economic power deeper into political turmoil.
Barring a last-minute surprise, Prime Minister Michel Barnier's government will be France's first to be forced out by a no-confidence vote in more than 60 years, at a time when the country is struggling to tame a massive budget deficit.
The left and far right combined have more than enough MPs for the no-confidence vote to go through and they made clear as the debate on no-confidence motions started that they wanted Barnier gone.
The result of the vote on these motions was expected around 1900 GMT.
"We have arrived at the moment of truth," far-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen said, adding that Barnier will be voted down because his austerity budget plans for next year were "dangerous and unfair" and meant "chaos" for France.
And hard left France Unbowed lawmaker Eric Coquerel told Barnier: "You will be the first prime minister to be censured since Georges Pompidou in 1962."
He said a majority of French citizens backed the no-confidence motion and argued that Barnier, appointed by President Emmanuel Macron in September, nearly two months after an inconclusive snap election, had lacked legitimacy from the start.
If the vote does indeed pass, Macron plans to name a new prime minister very quickly, possibly even before the grand reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral at the weekend, according to sources in Macron's camp, including parliamentary sources.
That would avoid leaving a hole at the heart of the European Union at a time when Germany is also weakened and in election mode, and weeks before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump re-enters the White House.
But any new prime minister would face the same challenges as Barnier in getting bills, including the 2025 budget, adopted by a divided parliament. There can be no new parliamentary election before July.
In a TV interview on Tuesday, Barnier said he still believed his government could survive the vote. But Jordan Bardella, the RN party president under Le Pen, said such optimism showed the government was "completely out of touch with what is happening in the country".
Senior left-wing lawmakers also confirmed that their camp would vote to oust Barnier.
NO-CONFIDENCE VOTE PUTS BID TO CUT BUDGET DEFICIT AT RISK
The current crisis is not without risk for Le Pen, who has for years sought to convince voters she can offer stability.
"The French will harshly judge the choice you are going to make," Laurent Wauquiez, a lawmaker from the conservative Les Republicains party who backs Macron, told Le Pen in parliament.
Macron, who won a second mandate in 2022, precipitated the crisis by calling the snap parliamentary election in June.
His term as president runs until mid-2027 and he cannot be forced out by parliament, but the RN and the hard left have already been saying he should resign as he faces his biggest crisis since the Yellow (OTC:YELLQ) Vest popular unrest of 2018-19.
Since Macron called the election, France's CAC 40 benchmark stock market index has dropped nearly 10% and is the heaviest loser among top EU economies. The euro single currency is down nearly 4%.
Political uncertainty is already hitting France's services sector, a monthly survey showed.
"The positive signals ... that were seen over the summer, partly due to the Olympics, are now a thing of the past," Hamburg Commercial Bank economist Tariq Kamal Chaudhry said.
Barnier's draft budget, which triggered his likely downfall, had sought to cut the fiscal deficit, projected to exceed 6% of national output this year, with 60 billion euros ($63 billion) in tax hikes and spending cuts. It sought to squeeze the deficit down to 5% next year.
Barnier said the consequences of voting him out will be catastrophic for state finances, but Le Pen shrugged that off and said letting that budget go through would have been the worst policy possible.
Instead, she said her party would support an emergency law that rolls over the 2024 budget's tax-and-spend provisions into next year to ensure there is stopgap financing.
But that would mean that savings measures Barnier had planned would fall by the wayside.