French PM Francois Bayrou: The centrist Macron ally who was doomed to fall from the beginning

Prime Minister Francois Bayrou, a veteran centrist named in December after persuading President Emmanuel Macron he was the right person to restore political stability to France, now risks being ejected from office after just nine months.

A keen historian, Bayrou, 74, is only too aware of the risks of abrupt political endings, having written a biography of his hero, the French king Henry IV, who was assassinated in Paris in 1610.

But the task he faced was ominous from the start, with Bayrou leading a fractious centre-right coalition that could only muster a minority in parliament. He is the sixth premier of Macron’s mandate.

Analysts find it hard to see any scenario where he could win a confidence vote in parliament on Monday in a long-running standoff over the budget. Bayrou and his government are required to resign in case of defeat.

‘All on holiday’

Stubborn and gaffe-prone, Bayrou has also hastened the crisis by stunning not just the French public but also close political allies earlier this month by calling the confidence vote himself rather than waiting for the opposition to do so.

It remains unclear whether Bayrou had hopes of making a deal with the opposition or simply wanted, according to one person close to him who asked not to be named, “to die on stage”.

Former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who has a notoriously tense relationship with Bayrou, called it an act of “political suicide”.

Bayrou wants to “write his own legend”, added a minister who asked not to be named.

Having called the vote Bayrou sometimes did himself no favours, angering many in France by saying the prosperity of the young should not be sacrificed for the sake of the “comfort of the boomers”. To try to reduce France’s debt, he proposed scrapping two public holidays — a move guaranteed to cause anger in a country that treasures time off.

Bayrou also irked opponents by saying he had not spoken to them over the summer as they were “all on holiday” and declaring “the only person who was not on holiday was me”.

‘Ship with a hole’

He has repeatedly insisted there is no alternative to France implementing significant cost savings and debt reduction, likening France to a “ship that has a hole in its hull and is filling with water every day”.

Bayrou is one of the few political heavyweights to have stood by Macron since he came to power in 2017. He heads the liberal Democratic Movement (MoDem) party which is allied to, but not part of, Macron’s centrist force.

Three times a presidential candidate himself, in 2002, 2007 and 2012, he was long cited as an obvious choice for Macron as head of government, a post he openly coveted.

With Macron under pressure to make a choice to replace the ousted Michel Barnier in December 2024, Bayrou in a reportedly fiery meeting at the Elysee strong-armed Macron into naming him ahead of defence minister Sebastien Lecornu.

He was eligible for the post after being acquitted in February 2024 after a seven-year-long case over the fraudulent employment of parliamentary assistants by his party, with the judge ruling that he was owed the “benefit of the doubt”.

School scandal

Deeply proud of his origins in the southwestern Bearn region of France, Bayrou is a practising Catholic, father of six children but also a staunch supporter of France’s secular system.

Perhaps aware that his post as premier would not last long, he has also clung to his other job as mayor of the southwestern city of Pau.

He faced acute pressure earlier this year over accusations from the opposition that as education minister between 1993 and 1997 he knew of widespread physical and sexual abuse at the Notre-Dame de Betharram school in southwestern France over many decades.

Bayrou however insisted he was only made aware of the scandal through media reports.

Several of Bayrou’s children attended the school, and in April Bayrou’s eldest daughter accused the clergy running the school of systemic abuse, saying a priest beat her during summer camp when she was 14. But she said that her father did not know about the incident.

(This is an agency copy. Except for the headline, the copy has not been edited by Firstpost staff.)