Hello and welcome to NewsHour live from the BBC World Service in London. I'm Rebecca Kesbis.

And we head straight to France, where in the past couple of hours, the Prime Minister, Francois

Beirou, has lost a confidence vote plunging the country into yet more political crisis.

President Emmanuel Macron is now left with nothing but hard decisions, whether to appoint another Prime Minister, his fifth in less than two

years, or call yet another snap election. He's technically in power as president for another two years,

but he's also facing calls to resign.

And there's some, seems to be no unity in the French Parliament.

The scale of the government defeat tonight was even worse than had been predicted.

We'll take a look at what all this means in a moment, but it's been a dramatic day.

Mr Beiru called the vote of confidence himself,

asking the Parliament, which is broadly split into three different blocks from the far left

to the far right, to back his budget plans. The country is facing eye-watering levels of national

debt, and Mr Beiru said that the whole model of the nation needs to be reinvented.

He warns that if the economic outlook isn't fixed, France's youth will fall victim to the slavery of debt.

Submission to debt is the same as submission through military force, being dominated by weapons or by our creditors.

In both cases, overwhelmed by debt, we lose our freedom.

And in both cases, it is up to us to break free, to reclaim the path to liberty.

This requires nothing more than an effort on our part.

Well, the leader of the far-right national rally,

Marine Le Pen, was one of the voices calling on President Emmanuel Macron

to dissolve the National Assembly this afternoon.

Dissolving the National Assembly is not something you do on a whim. It's an institutional

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