Emmanuel Macron took a while, but this Friday he chose François Bayrou as the new Prime Minister of Francereplacing Michel Barnier. The leader of the Democratic Movement (MoDem) is a centrist profile who, in addition to being mayor of the town of Pou, was a candidate for the presidential elections in 2002, 2007 and 2012. Now he will have to put together an Executive that passes a vote in the National Assembly .
The government of the conservative Barnier, which was already approved with many doubts last summer and supported by the extreme right, fell after Barnier approved the Social Security Budget by decree last Mondaythrough article 49.3 of the Constitution, and bypassing Parliament. He had no support for a vote, even despite giving in to RN on issues such as energy or pensions. This step caused the NFP, the majority force in the Assembly, to present a motion of censure, to which it added the votes of Le Pen’s party.
Macron’s first objective is that The new Government will hold out at least until the summer, which is the deadline to call new legislative elections.. On the other hand, the option of resigning does not cross the president’s mind, something that Francia Insumisa has demanded of him, although he has not found support from the radical right in this initiative.
The appointment of this profile ignores, for example, the left’s requests for Macron to appoint a prime minister from his ideological camp. From 1993 to 1997, Bayrou was Minister of National Education in three successive governments (the last one led by Eduard Philippe in 2017). He was also a member of the National Assembly for a seat in Pyrénées-Atlantiques from 1986 to 2012 with brief interruptions and a member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2002. He has been mayor of Pau since 2014. He was one of the main names on the president’s list, who met with him this Friday for almost two hours. Macron had given himself two days on Tuesday to choose Barnier’s successor, but it took longer than expected, French media explain, due to the “difficulty of finding a name that could generate consensus.”
One of the first reactions came from Jordan Bardella, the general secretary of the National Rally, who quickly said who will present the “red lines” to the new prime minister before knowing whether or not to vote in favor of his Government. Of course, he pointed directly to Macron and defined him as “a mutinous president.”
With this decision, and pending the passage in the National Assembly, the president tries to return stability to the country at a time when his own approval level among citizens is the lowest since he came to power in 2017. What Emmanuel Macron is doing is paradoxical: while he retains a level of consideration in the EU that is still high, his wear and tear at the national level is also evident. He can no longer run for president in 2027, but he still has a political space in very low hours, and France at a point that right now seems very difficult to overcome.
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