PARIS — François Bayrou is set to be booted out as France’s prime minister on Monday, but that doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the long political road of the canny, three-time presidential candidate.
Does the 74-year-old from the Pyrenees have one more shot at the Elysée Palace in him? Is he the centrist unifier who could stop the far-right National Rally from coming to power in 2027 and reshaping Europe’s political landscape under Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella?
When asked by reporters, he tends to observe knowingly: “That’s not how the game is played.”
Bayrou is undaunted by his current poor showing in the polls. As he sees it, the pieces will only start to click in the winter of late 2026.
“The criterion,” he believes, “is that in their kitchen, around family meals, at the earliest at Christmas, in February or in March, there are people who say: This one can do it.”
For now, Bayrou seems unlikely to be that “one.” He is set to lose a vote of no confidence next week after failing to push through a raft of severe budget cuts he says are vital to stop France, the EU’s second-largest economy, from pitching into a Greek-style debt crisis.
Bayrou’s logic is that he will ultimately be vindicated as a principled prophet on the dangers of overspending. Should his dire warnings prove prescient, every family forced to scrimp on presents for their children in 2026 or on festive staples like champagne and oysters next Christmas will see Bayrou as the guru who “told you so.”
Even so, he has a lot of ground to claw back in terms of popularity. The big presidential showdown in the spring of 2027 may still be far off, but other former centrist prime ministers, namely Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal, currently look better placed for the race.
Bayrou’s standing has not been helped by an ugly scandal this year featuring revelations that his daughter — unbeknown to him — was one of multiple children abused at a Catholic school near the city of Pau, his southwestern bastion in the Pyrenees.
Pyrenean politics
Bayrou, a former mayor of Pau, is proud of his regional heritage and rural origins. His father, a farmer, was crushed to death by a hay wagon.
But his béarnais charm conceals the fact that Bayrou is a veteran political operator — and a strong proponent of a classical education — who has survived for decades through his talent for gauging France’s political fickle political winds.
A former teacher, Bayrou draws inspiration from (and wrote a book about) Henri IV, the famously pragmatic king and fellow Pau native who converted from the Protestant faith to Catholicism to save France from the bloodshed of the wars of religion.
Bayrou was unafraid to throw his support behind the Socialist François Hollande and burn bridges with center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy before the 2012 presidential election, which Sarkozy lost. That winning bet helped him become the face of French centrism in the months that followed.
Bayrou was also one of the earliest supporters of a virtually unknown young economy minister named Emmanuel Macron, who spurned the Socialist Party in 2016 to create his own centrist movement in a long-shot bid for the presidency. He has even been known to boast that Macron wouldn’t have won the presidency without his support.
Having failed to win the top job in 2002, 2007 and 2012, Bayrou surely has only one chance left.
His strategy now is to depart his PM role showing he was prepared to go down fighting on a point of principle — the need to balance the books being one that he has stressed for years.
Faced with the same intractably divided parliament that doomed his predecessor, Michel Barnier, as he tries to pass his budget reforms, Bayrou is confronting his fate rather than having it imposed upon him. Or, in the words of one ministerial adviser overheard moments after Bayrou announced his plans: “It’s better to die by suicide than suffer in agony.”
Bayrou will be hoping his self-immolation can set the stage for a phoenix-like resurrection.
All it would take is a dash of economic calamity.
Mr. Anti-Debt
Since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958, only Jacques Chirac has succeeded in using the French premiership as a springboard to the presidency. Prime ministers tend to leave office worse off than they started, wrung dry of political capital by powerful presidents who lean on them to do the dirty work of legislating.
But Bayrou’s career-long warnings about profligate public spending could come to fruition.
“He wants to be Mr. Anti-Debt,” said one high-ranking ally of the president who was granted anonymity to candidly discuss the current state of French politics.
It’s still a sheer climb. Bayrou is historically unpopular, with one poll late last month showing just 19 percent of respondents had a favorable opinion of him. He’ll need to contend with criticism that he was all talk and failed to address issues relating to French debt while holding positions of authority.
Europe’s increasing disdain for career politicians and its preference for upstart populists won’t help either.
Surveys show that Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, already the single largest opposition party in France’s more powerful lower house of parliament, is the most popular political movement in the country.
Bayrou’s machinations aren’t a secret within the gilded walls of the Elysée. Some of Macron’s allies question whether the prime minister is exaggerating the threat posed by France’s sky-high budget deficit for political reasons.
While there’s wide agreement that France needs to get its books in order, not everyone is concerned that Paris will need to turn to the International Monetary Fund or the European Central Bank for a bailout in the short term.
ECB chief Christine Lagarde said in an interview Monday that the situation is worrying but not yet dire.
Macron himself reportedly tried to downplay the crisis at a meeting with his ministers last week, and believes the government could survive if it found a way to bring the center-left Socialists back into the fold, despite their anger with Bayrou over retirement reforms.
Markets are jittery and borrowing costs are rising, but not drastically.
Whether the economy runs into a real storm will determine whether Bayrou sees out his career at the center of power in Paris, or back home in Pau.
Paul de Villepin contributed reporting.
The post François Bayrou may still have one last act appeared first on Politico.
