Macron names veteran centrist ally as French prime minister

Paris: French President Emmanuel Macron has named François Bayrou as his fourth prime minister in a year, charging the veteran centrist and long-time ally with steering the country out of its second political crisis in the past six months.

The announcement came in a one-sentence statement from the Elysee Palace after Macron missed his own deadline for naming a new government leader.

Bayrou, 73, is expected to put forward his list of ministers in the coming days but is likely to face the same difficulties as outgoing prime minister Michel Barnier in steering legislation through a hung parliament comprising three warring blocs. His proximity to the deeply unpopular Macron may also prove to be a vulnerability.

Francois Bayrou, right, with French President Emmanuel Macron in 2020.Credit: AP

His priority will be passing a special law to roll over the 2024 budget while a nastier battle over the 2025 legislation looms early next year. Parliamentary pushback over the 2025 bill led to the downfall of Barnier’s government.

Jordan Bardella, president of the far-right National Rally (RN) party, said it would not be calling for an immediate no-confidence motion, while fellow RN leader Marine Le Pen said Bayrou should listen to the opposition’s budgetary wishes.

Bayrou may also have some leverage with the RN after coming to Le Pen’s aide when she risked not having enough sponsorship from elected officials to run in the 2022 presidential election. He backed her presidential bid by giving her his formal signature as an elected official and said at the time that barring her path would have been undemocratic.

But if history is any indication, the incoming prime minister may well want to pay attention to what his predecessor learned the hard way: there is no placating Marine Le Pen. Barnier’s brief stint also began with Le Pen mostly on his side before she decided to vote him out despite securing key budgetary concessions.

Reaction to Bayrou’s appointment on the left was more mixed.

Communist leader Fabien Roussel said his party would hold fire against Bayrou as long as he did not ram through legislation.

However, far-left France Unbowed leaders said they would be seeking to remove him, and Greens boss Marine Tondelier said she would support a no-confidence motion if Bayrou ignored their tax and pensions concerns.

France’s festering political malaise has raised doubts about whether Macron will complete his second presidential term, which ends in 2027. It has left a power vacuum in the heart of Europe, just as Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House.

Macron spent the days after Barnier’s departure speaking to leaders from the conservatives to the Communists to lock in support for Bayrou. The RN and France Unbowed were excluded.

There was no immediate comment from the conservative Les Republicains party, which supported the previous government, nor from Socialist Party leaders, whose involvement in Bayrou’s coalition may come with a hefty price tag in next year’s budget.

“Now we will see how many billions the support of the Socialist Party will cost,” a government adviser said.

No legislative election before mid-year

Macron will hope Bayrou can stave off no-confidence votes until at least July, when France will be able to hold a new parliamentary election, but his own future as president will inevitably be questioned if the government should fall again.

Bayrou, the founder of the Democratic Movement (MoDem) party, which has been a part of Macron’s ruling alliance since 2017, has himself run for president three times, leaning on his rural roots as the longtime mayor of the south-western town of Pau.

Macron appointed Bayrou as justice minister in 2017, but he resigned only weeks later amid an investigation into his party’s alleged fraudulent employment of parliamentary assistants. He was cleared of fraud charges this year.

The fragmented nature of the National Assembly, rendered nigh-on ungovernable after Macron’s June snap election, means Bayrou will likely be at the mercy of the president’s opponents for the foreseeable future.

Barnier’s budget bill, which aimed for €60 billion ($100 billion) in savings to assuage investors increasingly concerned by the country’s 6 per cent deficit, was deemed too miserly by the far-right and left, and the government’s failure to find a way out of the gridlock has seen French borrowing costs push higher still.

Reuters, Bloomberg

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