France's President Emmanuel Macron looks on during a visit to The British Museum in London, on July 9, 2025. BENJAMIN CREMEL/Pool via REUTERS

By Dominique Vidalon and Benjamin Mallet

PARIS (Reuters) -President Emmanuel Macron welcomed mainstream political leaders to a crunch meeting at the Elysee ahead of a self-imposed late-Friday deadline to name a new prime minister, as the country's central bank chief warned political turmoil was sapping growth.

Macron, 47, is searching for his sixth prime minister in under two years and will need to find a figure whose appeal spans the centre-right to centre-left in order to steer the budget for 2026 through a fragmented and fractious parliament.

Ahead of the meeting, the president's Elysee office said the gathering needed to be a "moment of collective responsibility," which political pundits quickly interpreted as a signal he could call snap parliamentary elections if no consensus candidate was found.

Party leaders from the left, right and centre arrived at the Elysee, but the far-right National Rally (RN) and hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) - two of the largest political parties in the National Assembly - were excluded.

It was unclear how long Friday's talks would last. Macron's 48-hour deadline to name a new premier is due to expire later on Friday night.

WHO MIGHT MACRON APPOINT AS PRIME MINISTER?

The daily Le Parisien newspaper reported that Macron intended to reappoint Sebastien Lecornu, who resigned as prime minister on Monday after just 27 days in the post, and that the president did not rule out a snap vote if other party leaders reject the proposal. Lecornu was not due to attend the meeting at the Elysee, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Other names that have been floated in political circles include veteran centrist Jean-Louis Borloo, the head of the public auditor Pierre Moscovici, and Nicolas Revel, a technocrat who leads the Paris hospitals administration.

Reappointing Lecornu would risk alienating the political leaders whose backing Macron needs to form a broad-based government that can get a budget over the line.

COMPLEX BUDGET TALKS

Wrangling over a budget that can both rein in the country's deficit while meeting the conflicting demands of both the left and conservatives has been going on for weeks, with Socialist demands for a repeal of a 2023 pensions reform and for heavier taxation of the rich proving big stumbling blocks.

"People tell me: 'He's going to test the Lecornu 2 hypothesis on you.' If that's the case, I wish him good luck," Green party chief Marine Tondelier told TF1 television.

Gabriel Attal, a former Macron prime minister and head of the president's Renaissance party, cautioned against naming the next premier without wider support.

"I fear that trying the same method ... of naming a prime minister before there has been a compromise will produce the same effects," Attal told France 2 television.

SNAP ELECTION WOULD POSE RISKS FOR MAINSTREAM PARTIES

France's mainstream parties are keen to avoid a snap election. Opinion polls forecast the RN would be the main beneficiary and that another hung parliament would be the most likely result.

The crisis is the deepest that France, the euro zone's second-largest economy, has seen for decades. The turmoil was precipitated in part by the president's failed gamble on a snap election last year that further weakened his minority in parliament.

The central bank chief, Francois Villeroy de Galhau, forecast the political uncertainty would cost the economy 0.2 percentage points of gross domestic product. Business sentiment was suffering but the economy was broadly fine, he said.

"Uncertainty is ... the number one enemy of growth," Villeroy told RTL radio.

Villeroy said it would be preferable if the deficit did not exceed 4.8% of GDP in 2026. The deficit is forecast to hit 5.4% this year, nearly double the European Union's cap.

Macron's second-to-last prime minister, Francois Bayrou, was ousted by the National Assembly over his plans for 44 billion euros in savings to bring the deficit down to 4.6%.

Rating agencies issued a fresh round of warnings about France's sovereign credit score this week after Lecornu said on Monday his government was resigning, just 14 hours after he had announced his cabinet line-up.

(Reporting by Dominique Vidalon and Benjamin MalletWriting by Richard LoughEditing by Alison Williams, Frances Kerry and Toby Chopra)