Caroline Blumberg / POOL / EPA
It’s not left-wing, but it’s not right-wing either. Macron wants to calm things down, and chose the former Education Minister, who was once a presidential candidate, to take over Barnier’s position.
French President Emmanuel Macron today named the centrist ally François Bayrou as the new prime minister, after a historic parliamentary vote toppled Michel Barnier’s previous government on December 4th.
François Bayrou, 73 years old and well known in French politics for decades, became “charged with forming a government” according to a press release from the Presidency to which Lusa had access.
This will be the fourth head of French Government since Macron’s re-election in April 2022 for a five-year term.
The experienced Bayrou, leader of the centrist MoDem (Democratic Movement) party recently cleared in case of alleged embezzlement of funds of the European Parliament, will have to survive parliamentary censure and restore the country’s stability, since no party holds a majority in the National Assembly.
According to the, the challenge for the new prime minister is now to build a stable relative majority in the National Assemblyin order to avoid possible censorship and pass bills. But, like Michel Barnier before him, the newspaper points out that this will not be easy for the MoDem president.
However, on Friday morning, the head of state opinionor François Bayrouby phone, that he would not be appointed prime ministerbefore having a long meeting with him at the Élysée Palace.
According to information from Le Monde, during this meeting, Macron offered the MoDem leader the possibility of being number two of a government led by Roland Lescure. François Bayrou rejected the idea and, in return, raised the possibility of abandoning the presidential coalition.
Before the possibility of an impasse and a rupture with its main ally, Emmanuel Macron ended up change your mind and chose to nominate François Bayrou.
A priori, Bayrou should be able to count on 36 deputies from MoDem, 93 elected from Ensemble pour la République and 34 from the Horizontes group.
But uncertainty remains regarding the position of those elected Laurent Wauquiezof the Republican Right, or two leftist groups – Socialists, Ecologists and Communists.
The leader of the socialist party França Insubmissa, Mathilde Panothas already announced that his party will present a motion of censure against the newly appointed prime minister, Le Monde advances.
The president of the RN group (National Regrouping), Marine Le Pen, called on the new Prime Minister, François Bayrou, to “do what his predecessor did not want to do: listen to the opposition to build a reasonable and considered budget”.
“Any other policy that is simply a extension of ‘macronism’twice rejected at the polls, can only lead to impasse and failure”, also on the social network X.
