France’s Macron names veteran centrist ally Bayrou as prime minister

PARIS: French President Emmanuel Macron named Francois Bayrou as his fourth prime minister of 2024 on Friday, charging the veteran centrist with steering the country out of its second political crisis in the past six months.

The priority for Bayrou, a close Macron ally, will be passing a special law to roll over the 2024 budget, with a nastier battle over the 2025 legislation looming early next year. Parliamentary pushback over the 2025 bill led to the downfall of former Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s government.

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

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.

Pressure grows on France’s Macron to name new PM

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 party leaders said they would be seeking to remove Bayrou, 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 also lifted French borrowing costs and 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 ouster speaking to leaders from the conservatives to the Communists in an effort 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 on Friday.

No legislative election before summer

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.

Bayrou’s first real test will come early in the new year when lawmakers need to pass a belt-tightening 2025 budget bill.

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

Barnier’s budget bill, which aimed for 60 billion euros in savings to assuage investors increasingly concerned by France’s 6% 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.