France lurched into a political crisis after Prime Minister Francois Bayrou gambled on a confidence vote, with little hope of any quick solution to fix its ailing public finances, whether a new gover...

Prime Minister François Bayrou of France, facing a ballooning public debt and an increasingly raucous French public set on protesting any suggested cuts, announced a special parliamentary session nex...

The far-right National Rally, the Greens and later the Socialists, on whose vote Bayrou's fate largely lies, said they did not see how they could back him.