Sébastien Lecornu

Biography

Sébastien Lecornu was born in 1986 in Eaubonne, Val-d'Oise, the son of an aeronautical technician and a medical secretary, and went to school in Vernon in Normandy. He took a law degree at Panthéon-Assas University, where he began but did not finish a master's in public law. Active in the Union for a Popular Movement from 2002, he became a parliamentary assistant in 2005 and in 2008, aged 22, an adviser to Bruno Le Maire, then secretary of state for European affairs.

Elected mayor of Vernon in 2014, he gave up the post in 2015 on becoming president of the departmental council of Eure, which he led again in 2021-2022. He joined Emmanuel Macron's first government in June 2017 as a secretary of state for the ecological transition, was expelled from The Republicans that October and moved to La République En Marche, later Renaissance.

He was minister for local authorities from 2018, co-leading the national debate organised in response to the yellow vests protests, then minister for the overseas territories from 2020 and, from May 2022, minister of the armed forces. In that post he presented the 2024-2030 military programming law, which roughly doubled planned defence spending.

Macron appointed him prime minister on 9 September 2025 after the fall of François Bayrou's government. He resigned on 6 October, hours after unveiling his first cabinet, but was reappointed four days later. He survived no-confidence motions after offering to suspend the 2023 pension reform, and in early 2026 used Article 49.3 to push the budget through.