Lecornu's survival came at a hefty price. Earlier this week he pledged to suspend President Emmanuel Macron's contested pension reform to secure crucial support from the Socialist Party in France's deeply fragmented National Assembly.
And despite Thursday's lifeline, the motions have underscored the fragility of Macron's administration midway through his second and final term.
The Socialists had said they would vote down the government if its demands for more concessions in Lecornu's belt-tightening budget were not met. Opponents on the hard-left and far-right painted the government's win as a mere stay of execution.
"The Lecornu government is on borrowed time. The battle over the budget begins," hard-left lawmaker Eric Coquerel, who heads the finance committee in the lower house, said on X.
The no-confidence motion presented by Coquerel's hard-left France Unbowed party secured 271 votes, just 18 short of the 289 votes needed to fell the four-day-old government.
A second motion by Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN) failed by a larger margin.
By putting the pension reform on the chopping block, Lecornu threatens to kill off one of Macron's main economic legacies at a time when France's public finances are in a perilous state, leaving the president with little in the way of domestic achievements after eight years in office.
If Lecornu had lost either vote, he and his ministers would have had to immediately resign, and Macron would have come under huge pressure to call a snap parliamentary election, plunging France deeper into crisis.
Lecornu now faces weeks of arduous negotiations in parliament over passing a slimmed-down 2026 budget during which he could be toppled at any point. Debate begins in parliament's finance committee on Monday.
France is in the midst of its worst political crisis in decades as a succession of minority governments seek to push deficit-reducing budgets through a truculent legislature split into three distinct ideological blocs.
Reforming France's generous pension system has been political kryptonite ever since Socialist President Francois Mitterrand cut the retirement age to 60 from 65 in 1982. In France, the average effective retirement age is just 60.7, compared to the OECD average of 64.4.
Macron's reform raised the statutory retirement age by two years to 64 by 2030. Although that only brings French policy into line with other European Union member states, it chips away at a cherished social benefit beloved by the left.
