France’s new prime minister seizes his moment

The previous prime minister of France, conservative Michel Barnier, lasted just three months in office. Now President Emmanuel Macron is betting on another 73-year-old political veteran, the centrist François Bayrou, to navigate France’s political turmoil for longer.

Bayrou, the mayor of the south-western city of Pau and a former minister, was one of Macron’s earliest supporters and helped him win the presidential election in 2017. His 36 lawmakers are a key component of Macron’s group in the National Assembly, and his lieutenants have held key ministerial positions in successive governments. 

But Bayrou also has an independent political identity and his own party known as the MoDem — separate from Macron — which he will seek to capitalise on to avoid meeting the same fate as Barnier. 

Philippe Vigier, a MoDem member of parliament, said Bayrou’s force of character and political connections across the spectrum would help him rally broader support.

“He is the original centrist,” he said. “The forces in parliament will be the same, but he will speak to everyone and benefit from connections built over decades.” 

The turmoil in France began in the summer when Macron called and then lost early legislative elections, ushering in a raucous hung parliament with an ascendant far right led by Marine Le Pen and a larger leftist bloc. Last week they ousted Barnier, passing a censure motion over his unpopular deficit-cutting budget. 

Macron delayed the announcement of his choice of premier from Thursday evening until midday Friday, amid reports he was having second thoughts about 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 lasting nearly two hours at the Élysée Palace on Friday morning, but convinced Macron of the importance of keeping MoDem support. His name was announced only hours later.

“He thinks that this is his moment, so you can imagine that he would be willing to take his liberty back” from the alliance with Macron if he was not named premier, said Richard Ramos, a MoDem MP and longtime ally.

“Bayrou is no one’s vassal; he is an ally of Macron, not his vassal.”

The Elysée did not return requests for comment on the events of Friday. 

Like that of his predecessor, Bayrou’s political career spans five decades. He has run for the presidency three times, served as education minister for centre-right governments, then was briefly justice minister under Macron in 2017.

Bayrou was then preparing a package of reforms to clean up politics and party funding — one of his signature themes — when he himself was forced to resign over a financing scandal involving the MoDems. In the subsequent court case, the party was convicted of embezzling EU funds by using Brussels staffers for national political activities. Bayrou was found not guilty in a first trial, but prosecutors are appealing against that judgment.

Despite being a fixture in national political life since the 1990s, Bayrou has stayed true to his provincial roots, in contrast with 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 Béarn region in the foothills of the Pyrenees. A practising Catholic, Bayrou has six children.

A proud Béarnais he may be, but Bayrou has also been described as having a Pyrenean-sized ego.

Former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who Bayrou ran against in 2007 — leading to a bitter feud between the two men — recalled meeting his centrist rival shortly after taking office. Writing in his memoirs, Sarkozy admitted “to experiencing real difficulty with the visibly flattering idea he had of himself. I’ve always wondered what led him to believe at that stage that his views were so valuable.”

Bayrou started off as liberal christian democrat allied with former president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and served as a minister under the Gaullist Jacques Chirac. He set out to occupy the political centre ground in 2007 when he founded MoDem and ran against Sarkozy, a decision that many French conservatives still resent.

In 2012, Bayrou backed the presidential campaign of socialist François Hollande. 

Bayrou’s hero is the French monarch Henri IV, who he sees as a symbol of reconciliation between bitter foes. He has written two books about the first of the Bourbon kings, who granted religious freedom to Protestants under the 1598 Edict of Nantes — and who also hailed from Pau.

Saying that he would try to unite rather than divide French people, Bayrou added of his appointment: “And it’s come at the right moment because today is the anniversary of Henri IV’s birth, about whom I have written a lot, because I think reconciliation is needed.” 

Erwan Balanant, another MoDem deputy, said the new prime minister’s bridge-building instincts would stand him in good stead.

“He has tried to make people who came from different backgrounds work together . . . He is the one who can build this necessary coalition,” he added.

But Bayrou was clear-eyed about the challenges facing him, saying in an acceptance speech on Friday that he “is fully aware of the Himalaya that stands before us of difficulties of all sorts”.

Bayrou’s prospects will first depend on whether he can pull off the feat that defeated Barnier: passing a 2025 budget that will need to include unpopular tax hikes and even more unpopular spending cuts, if France is to begin to narrow its yawning deficit.

He has long preached that France should get its fiscal house in order, and made that a central campaign issue in 2007 despite voters disliking the message. “Debt is a moral problem, since putting it on the shoulders of our children . . . is unacceptable,” he said on Friday.

If Bayrou is to succeed, he will need to neutralise Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) and crucially negotiate at least a truce with the moderate left, in particular the Socialist party. Yet if he leans too far left, then he will alienate the rightwing Les Republicains, who had allied with the centre to prop up Barnier.   

Following Barnier’s downfall, Macron tried to negotiate a non-aggression pact with the opposition, excluding the far right and far left, and his new premier’s survival will depend on whether it holds. The president had hoped to escape the RN’s grip by convincing the socialists, communists and Greens not to censure the new government in exchange for concessions. 

But the early signs from the left were not positive. Socialist leader Olivier Faure, as well as key figures from the Greens and communists, slammed Macron for again choosing someone from his own camp.

“Our votes will depend on the promises you make to build a compromise to change the direction of the government,” Faure wrote in an open letter to Bayrou, adding that their priorities would be pensions, tax justice and green policies.

As for Marine Le Pen, she has had cordial relations with Bayrou over the years. He sometimes helped the RN in the interests of creating a more representative political system, even lending her the necessary signatures to run for president.

When the RN struggled to borrow from banks to fund their campaigns, Bayou said they deserved to be financed like any other party — a move that went against the mainstream practice of ostracising the far right.

Bayrou has long supported changing the electoral system in France to introduce more proportional representation in order to coax parties to compromise in parliament. Le Pen has also called for such a change.

Yet Le Pen put him on notice on Friday, saying she did not exclude voting for another censure motion. She wrote on X: “Any politician who just prolongs Macronism, which has been rejected twice at the ballot box, can only lead to an impasse and to failure.”