Macron picks François Bayrou as prime minister to navigate France’s crisis

François Bayrou for PM.
Photo: AFP

French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday tapped François Bayrou to serve as France’s fourth prime minister this year, tasking the longtime centrist to help steer the country out of a political and budgetary quagmire with no clear solution in sight, writes POLITICO.

Bayrou, one of Macron’s earliest supporters, was long seen as a front runner for the job, but the messy, disorganized manner in which he was named to the post signals a difficult road ahead. Bayrou and Macron sat down together at the Élysée for nearly two hours Friday morning in what French media described as a “tense” meeting. Le Monde reported the French president told Bayrou he would not be prime minister.

The choice appeared to be debated until the last minute.

Though Bayrou ended up being named to a job he has sought for years, it’s unclear how the 73-year-old from southwestern France will be able to escape the same fate as his predecessor, Michel Barnier. Lawmakers from the far right and left united to torpedo his government last week after the former Brexit negotiator tried to pass an unpopular, slimmed-down social security budget to rein in the country’s massive deficit.

Barnier attempted to thread the needle through a fractured French legislature by securing the tacit support of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, which worked for a time. The far-right party wielded an unprecedented amount of influence in policymaking and secured some key concessions in budget negotiations, but Le Pen eventually withdrew her party’s support for Barnier’s government over his budget plans. 

Bayrou told reporters that he would work to reconcile a divided country shortly after news of his nomination broke. At the official handover ceremony later in the day, Bayrou made it clear he would also try to bring down the budget deficit and acknowledged the “Himalayan” sized challenge that lay ahead of him.

“I know that the odds of difficulty are far greater than the odds of success,” he said.

Bayrou’s immediate challenge will be to form a government that isn’t quickly taken down by the opposition, a difficult task considering his ministers will mostly hail from a narrow coalition of pro-Macron and conservative MPs of the previous cabinet. 

The hard-left France Unbowed has already vowed to bring forward a no-confidence motion against Bayrou, though Marine Tondelier, the head of the Greens and linchpin in the broad leftist alliance, said her party would wait — but that it would have “no other choice” but to topple the new prime minister if he keeps in place Macron-era policies and outgoing ministers in key roles.

Bayrou has faced heavy political headwinds before and he’s proven to be a survivor. He has already held two high-ranking positions in government, serving as education minister under conservative Prime Minister Edouard Balladur in the 1990s and a brief stint as justice minister immediately after Macron’s election in 2017 — a job he was forced to resign after less than a month when he was placed under formal investigation for allegedly embezzling European Parliament funds.

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