The former French Prime Minister, conservative Michel Barnier, lasted in office for only three months. Now President Emmanuel Macron is betting on another 73-year-old veteran politician, centrist François Bayrou, to navigate France's political turmoil for a while longer.
Bayrou, mayor of the southwestern city of Pau and a former minister, was one of Macron's early supporters and helped him win the presidential election in 2017. His 36 deputies form a key component of Macron's group in the National Assembly, and his party. Lieutenants held key ministerial positions in successive governments.
But Bayrou also has an independent political identity and his own party known as the Democratic Movement – separate from Macron – which he will seek to leverage to avoid facing the same. Barnier's fate.
Philippe Vigier, a member of parliament from the Democratic Movement Party, said that Bayrou's strength of personality and his political connections across the spectrum will help him garner broader support.
“He is the original centrist,” he said. He added: “The forces in Parliament will be the same, but he will talk to everyone and benefit from the contacts built over decades.”
The unrest in France began in the summer when Macron called and then lost early legislative elections, leading to a tumultuous hung parliament with the rise of the far-right led by Marine Le Pen and a larger left-wing bloc. Last week They ousted Barnierpassing a motion to censure his unpopular deficit reduction budget.
Macron postponed the announcement of his choice for prime minister from Thursday evening until midday on Friday, amid reports that he was reconsidering Bayrou. But the president had few viable options.
According to people close to Bayrou, he was initially told he would not get the job during a tense meeting that lasted nearly two hours at the Elysee Palace on Friday morning, but he convinced Macron of the importance of maintaining MDM support. His name was announced only hours later.
“He thinks this is his moment, so you can imagine he would be willing to take back his freedom” from allying with Macron if he is not made prime minister, said Richard Ramos, a MDP lawmaker and longtime ally.
“Pyro is not subordinate to anyone; He is an ally of Macron, not his follower.”
The Elysee did not respond to requests for comment on Friday's events.
Like his predecessor, Bayrou's political career spans five decades. He ran for president three times, served as Minister of Education in centre-right governments, and then briefly served as Minister of Justice under Macron in 2017.
Bayrou was then preparing a package of reforms to clean up politics and party financing – one of his signature topics – when he himself was forced to resign due to a financing scandal involving the Democratic Movement. In the subsequent court case, the party was found guilty of embezzling EU funds by using employees in Brussels to carry out national political activities. Bayrou was found not guilty in the first trial, but prosecutors are appealing that ruling.
Despite being a fixture in national political life since the 1990s, Bayrou has remained true to his regional roots, in contrast to the Parisian elite in Macron's inner circle. The son of a farmer who died in a tractor accident, he built a political fiefdom in Pau, a city in the Béarne region in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Bayro is a devout Catholic and has six children.
Bernier may be proud, but Bayrou has also been described as having an ego the size of the Pyrenees.
Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, against whom Bayrou ran in 2007 – leading to a bitter dispute between the two men – recalls meeting his centrist rival shortly after taking office. In his memoirs, Sarkozy admitted that he “had real difficulty dealing with the wonderful idea he had of himself. I have always wondered what led him to believe at that stage that his opinions were so valuable.”
Bayrou started out as a liberal Christian Democrat allied with former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and served as a minister under Gaullist Jacques Chirac. He began to occupy the political center in 2007 when he founded the “Democrats” movement and ran against Sarkozy, a decision that many French conservatives still resent.
In 2012, Bayrou supported the presidential campaign of socialist François Hollande.
Bayrou's hero is the French King Henry IV, who considers him a symbol of reconciliation between bitter rivals. He has written two books about the first Bourbon kings, who granted religious freedom to Protestants by the Edict of Nantes in 1598 – and who also hails from Pau.
Bayrou said he would try to unite the French people rather than divide them, and added of his appointment: “It came at the right moment because today is the anniversary of the birth of Henri IV, about whom I have written a lot, because I believe that reconciliation is necessary.”
Erwan Balanant, another MDP lawmaker, said the new prime minister's bridge-building instincts would stand him in good stead.
He tried to get people from different backgrounds to work together. . . He added: “He is the person who can build this necessary alliance.”
But Bairau was clear about the challenges facing him, saying in his acceptance speech on Friday that he was “fully aware that the Himalayas lie before us of difficulties of all kinds.”
Bayrou's prospects will depend first on whether he is able to achieve the feat that defeated Barnier: passing a 2025 budget that will need to include unpopular tax increases and even more unpopular spending cuts, if France is to begin to succeed. Narrowing its ballooning deficit.
He had long preached that France should get its fiscal house in order, and he made this issue a central issue in his 2007 election campaign despite voters' dissatisfaction with that message. “Debt is a moral problem, since we place it on the shoulders of our children. . . He said on Friday that this was unacceptable.
If Bayrou is to succeed, he will need to neutralize Le Pen's National Rally party and at least decisively negotiate a truce with the moderate left, especially the Socialist Party. However, if he leans far left, he will alienate right-wing Republicans, who have allied with the center to support Barnier.
After Barnier's fall, Macron tried to negotiate Non-aggression agreement with the oppositionWith the exception of the far right and the far left, the survival of the new prime minister will depend on whether he survives or not. The president hoped to escape the grip of the National Front by convincing the socialists, communists and greens not to criticize the new government in exchange for concessions.
But early signs from the left were not positive. Socialist leader Olivier Faure, as well as key figures from the Green Party and the Communists, criticized Macron for once again choosing someone from his camp.
“Our votes will depend on the promises you make to build a compromise to change the direction of the government,” Fore wrote in an open letter to Bairro, adding that their priorities would be pensions, tax fairness and green policies.
As for Marine Le Pen, she has had friendly relations with Bayrou over the years. He has at times assisted the National Front in the interest of creating a more representative political system, even lending it the signatures needed to run for president.
When the National Front struggled to borrow from banks to finance its campaigns, Bayo said it deserved funding like any other party – a move that ran counter to the prevailing practice of shunning the far right.
Bayrou has long supported changing France's electoral system to introduce more proportional representation in order to persuade parties to reach a compromise in parliament. Le Pen has also called for such a change.
However, Le Pen informed him on Friday, saying she did not rule out voting for another no-confidence motion. “Any politician who is content to prolong Macronism, which has been rejected twice at the ballot box, can only lead to a dead end and failure,” she wrote on X.
