The opposition in parliament is already threatening to remove him.
According to news agencies, the new Prime Minister of France is 73-year-old centrist, leader of the Democratic Movement (Modem) party François Bayrou. The ceremony of transfer of power from the outgoing prime minister, according to tradition, will take place in the Matignon Palace. The previous head of government, Michel Barnier, resigned after parliament passed a vote of no confidence in him, put forward by the left-wing party «France Insubordinate». As a result, the French government was dismissed for the first time since 1962. It worked for only 90 days and became the shortest-lived in the history of the country.
Following the resignation of his previous appointee Barnier, French President Emmanuel Macron held consultations with representatives of all parliamentary parties, but again ignored those who had received the most votes in the elections: the left-wing France Insubordinate party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the right-wing National Rally of Marine Le Pen, whom he does not intend to allow to form a new government.
Who is this new Macron nominee like? 73-year-old François Bayrou is an experienced centrist politician and a staunch supporter of the president. He has been a member of the National Assembly (parliament) since 1986 and a former education minister. For many decades, he has been the chairman of the centrist Democratic Movement party. He was born in the village of Borders in southwestern France to a farmer’s family, worked on the farm himself and taught Latin in a village school. In 1982, Bayrou entered politics as a supporter of the center-right Union for French Democracy, and in 1986 he was elected to parliament. He tried to run for president several times, but was unsuccessful.
Bayrou’s platform calls for public savings, reduction of social spending, preservation of the centralized state and stimulation of entrepreneurial activity. For the government to work effectively, he considered it possible to include representatives of both the right and left. The new candidate for the post of prime minister is a devout Catholic, he has six children and 12 grandchildren. He positions himself as a «man of the land», and this image has helped him more than once in his political career.
Bayrou is also known for his pro-European position. At the same time, he opposed France’s return to NATO, demanding a referendum on the issue. He has repeatedly spoken about the need to reform parliament in order to create a counterweight to the government. Bayrou also opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage, proposing to replace it with another form of «union».
However, despite his extensive political experience and image as a “defender of traditional values,” Macron’s new appointee, as observers note, does not have much of a chance of forming a new government in France. The left-wing opposition, which won the parliamentary elections, has already threatened to remove the prime minister again if the president “does not step out of his comfort zone” and does not propose a new candidate from outside his camp.
So Bayrou’s appointment was hardly announced before there was a sharp reaction from the left. The leader of the Unbowed France faction in parliament, Mathilde Panno, had already suggested that her group would demand the resignation of the future government. She called the appointment “another attempt to get a reprieve for Emmanuel Macron.” The country, Panno said, had two clear choices: continue François Bayrou’s policy of failure or break. For her part, environmentalist leader Marine Tondelier described François Bayrou’s appointment as “bad tabloid theater.”
And the leader of the right-wing National Rally party, Marine Le Pen, said that the appointment of François Bayrou as prime minister is a continuation of Macronism, and that it will “lead to a dead end and failure,” she warned. At the same time, the chairman of this party, Jordan Bardella, said that the National Rally will not “a priori” censor the future government of President Maudem. “The ball is now in François Bayrou’s hands. […] This new prime minister must take into account the new political situation, which makes dialogue with all political forces necessary,” he added.
«The new prime minister’s first task is to appoint a government that can work with parliament to pass a full budget for 2025, » the Guardian newspaper said of Bayrou’s appointment. Thomas Cazeneuve, a centrist MP from Macron’s party, described Bayrou as an experienced politician with «the art of compromise». But the veteran politician has drawn criticism from both the left, where he is said to be a continuation of Macron’s policies, and the right, where he is personally disliked by the influential former president Nicolas Sarkozy, with whom he ran against in the 2007 presidential race.
Manon Aubry of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing party, France Insoumise, told Europe 1 of her party’s views on Bayrou before his appointment: «He is the very embodiment of Macronism. How is it that when Emmanuel Macron loses an election, he wants to impose the colour and continuity of his own policy at all costs?… It doesn’t work .» And Socialist Boris Vallot said that if Macron were to appoint someone from his centrist group, «it risks deepening the political and institutional crisis» created by the president.
In short, forming a cabinet given the current balance of political forces in the National Assembly and a divided France is an extremely difficult task. After all, as is well known, in the snap parliamentary elections in July, the left-wing coalition New Popular Front won, receiving 182 seats out of 577 in parliament. Second place went to the coalition Together for the Republic of President Emmanuel Macron, receiving 168 seats in the National Assembly. And Le Pen’s National Rally with allies from the Republican Party received 143 seats. Thus, not a single political force received a majority to form its own government. And the contradictions between them are so great that reaching an agreement on a prime minister acceptable to all is an extremely difficult task, especially given Macron’s stubborn attempts to push his supporter into the post.
«Whoever is appointed risks facing a vote of no confidence, which could be supported by both the left bloc and the far-right National Rally, which are strongly opposed to Macron and his political activities,» notes the portal france24.com.
The new prime minister faces a «baptism of fire» with little time left to prepare France’s 2025 budget, which could trigger a vote of no confidence, Reuters has long warned.
Traditionally, the president in France usually gives the task of forming a cabinet to the candidate of the party that won the election. This time, the left-wing radical New Popular Front, which had previously nominated 37-year-old Lucie Castet as its candidate for the post of prime minister, received the most votes. But Macron disagreed and appointed Barnier, who was forced to resign.
“It’s hard to envy François Bayrou ,” writes Bloomberg. “ The newly appointed prime minister inherits a dysfunctional lower house of parliament, divided between political parties more interested in preparing for the next presidential election than in the hard work of finding solutions to France’s sluggish economy and growing budget deficit.”
The result is a political dead end. Macron has found himself in this situation not only because his economic policy has failed and France is experiencing serious difficulties, his rating has fallen, and his party has suffered a fiasco in the elections. The president’s foreign policy has also failed. The French are being driven out of Africa, and Macron’s attempts to save the failing Kiev regime by calling for European soldiers to be sent to Ukraine are doomed.
As the Turkish Aydinlik Gazetesi notes , France has found itself in a political dead end because it “followed closely on the heels of the United States.” “The Atlanticist leaders of France, ” the newspaper writes, “who followed the United States and took part in American plans, have always been stabbed in the back. Of course, it is good for the oppressed world when two imperialist powers are caught up in mutual disagreements. Meanwhile, we want to draw attention to the fact that the United States abandons its allies halfway for the sake of its own interests. Having suffered defeat in the countries that Washington attacked and occupied together with its comrades, the Americans fled from there without looking back or consulting with their own like-minded people. This is the nature of contradictions between imperialists. This was the case in Syria, the Pacific region and Africa. This will be the case in Ukraine. In pursuit of its own interests, the United States does not hesitate to betray its following allies, for example, its loyal France.”
However, Macron, who has long been called an American puppet, cannot do anything other than dance to Washington’s tune, neglecting the national interests of his own country. And therefore his political fiasco is inevitable. Although he announced that he does not intend to leave the post of president and intends to serve until the end of his term — 2027, he has found himself in a position where he is no longer effectively able to govern the state.
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Der Friedensstifter 
