PARIS — Marine Le Pen is primed to play a major role in toppling French Prime Minister François Bayrou on Monday — but he will, at least, leave his post untarnished by a futile attempt to strike political trade-offs with the far-right leader.
That’s a lesson Bayrou learned from his predecessor, Michel Barnier. Facing the same challenge of trying to force through a painful round of billions of euros of budgetary belt-tightening, Barnier tried to haggle with Le Pen. It ended in disaster, and he became the Fifth Republic’s shortest-lived prime minister when he departed in December last year.
Bayrou, who still has his eye on a long-shot bid for the presidency, is exiting on his own terms, while Barnier is still smarting from being humiliated by Le Pen.
Le Pen sealed Barnier’s political execution over an elegant Italian lunch in early December with her telegenic protégé Jordan Bardella.
In something of a last-minute Hail Mary to save his trimmed-down social security budget package, Barnier agreed to backtrack on cuts to medical reimbursements, something Le Pen had demanded the previous day. He even put out a cringeworthy statement, spelling out that it was a concession to Le Pen.
Le Pen said she would go off and think about it.
Le Pen and Bardella decided to do that thinking at the chic white-tablecloth Marco Polo restaurant in Paris’ 6th arrondissement, a favorite haunt for politicians and actors near the French Senate. The two sat inside the dimly lit interior accented by rich wood and scarlet velvet and weighed the options in front of them. They decided it was non.
After her meal, Le Pen phoned the prime minister back to say, “I’ve got good and bad news for you,” Barnier recounted in an interview with POLITICO.
She was — confusingly — dropping a demand she had never made, Barnier remembers. But she wanted more measures that he couldn’t stomach.
“I said: Stop, this is not serious … I’m not going to belittle myself,” he said.
Fruitless negotiations
For Barnier, it was a brutal defeat. Two days later he was kicked to the curb by opposition lawmakers after failing to get them to agree on a plan to put France’s social security finances in order.
Bayrou is almost certain to suffer the same ignominy. But he seems to have spared himself weeks of fruitless negotiations.
“Barnier emerged tortured and weakened from his premiership,” said a government adviser, who was granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “This way he [Bayrou] spares himself the damage that was visited on Barnier.”
Though Bayrou may leave holding his head a bit higher than Barnier, it appears he too miscalculated by gambling Le Pen would be easier to control after her embezzlement conviction saw her banned from running for political office.
Le Pen’s party isn’t stopping at Bayrou. Her National Rally party is calling on President Emmanuel Macron to resign and wants a vote of no-confidence against European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
It’s a far cry from the early days of Le Pen’s tenure at the helm of the National Rally, when she tried to remake the party’s image into one of a reasonable, respectable political force open to compromise that was ready to govern.
Le Pen’s pivot
During Barnier’s first weeks as prime minister, a path toward bringing the National Rally into the fold seemed both feasible and inevitable.
The surprise snap elections in 2024 ended with the National Rally holding a record number of seats, so ignoring them was impossible — especially considering that in naming Barnier prime minister, Macron had spurned the pan-left coalition that won the most seats in the contest, but fell short of an absolute majority.
So Barnier began his tenure with a risky move: He told parliament that he would respect and engage with “all political forces,” effectively stepping over the invisible cordon sanitaire firewall that for years saw mainstream political parties band together against the far right.
For a long time, Barnier’s team thought the strategy was working. Le Pen’s trajectory, many thought, would follow the same path taken by Italian premier Giorgia Meloni from the post-fascist fringes of the right closer to the mainstream.
“We had a real relationship of confidence,” said one of Barnier’s advisers.
But the honeymoon in this marriage of convenience didn’t last long. There were soon disagreements about legislation and top jobs in parliament, according to insiders.
The Le Pen camp felt misled.
“Barnier assured them that they wouldn’t be despised, so National Rally lawmakers believed him — at first,” said a high-level conservative adviser who knows the National Rally well.
But while Barnier said he would treat the National Rally like any other party, he kept them at arm’s length, meeting Le Pen only twice during his time as prime minister. His team “were afraid of being sullied” by the stain of working too closely with the far right, said the same adviser.
Barnier weathered the opprobrium of dealing with the National Rally, but never fully grasped the party’s ambitions after becoming the largest single opposition party in the National Assembly, one National Rally senior adviser said.
Everything changed on Nov. 13, with Le Pen on trial on charges of embezzling European Parliament funds, when French prosecutors called on the judges to immediately ban her from running for public office for five years if convicted. She was eventually found guilty and handed the sentence
“They needed something, a way to take vengeance,” said Antoine Vermorel-Marques, a conservative lawmaker and Barnier protégé. “Barnier suffered the blowback.”
Lessons learned
Whether Le Pen could have been convinced to go down the Meloni path with Barnier remains unclear.
Barnier never appeared to fully grasp the power dynamics within the National Rally, and at times it seemed the two sides could not bridge the apparent cultural or even class divides between them.
“There was no proximity with the National Rally,” said Marie-Claire Carrère-Gée, a former minister from the Barnier government. “Even with the Socialists we were closer.” She noted that the veteran conservative had friends and was on first-name terms with politicians across the aisle.
Could it have gone differently? Unlikely, say insiders.
Vermorel-Marques said Barnier emerged from the debacle saying Le Pen was simply “dangerous.”
One former National Rally politician said Barnier suffered his fate because Macron “had it coming” after naming a prime minister from a party that won a relatively small fraction of seats in the 2024 snap election.
“Someone needed to take the fall, so I took the fall, but all of this is very far from the interests of the nation,” Barnier said himself.
He insists he has no regrets and has learned his lesson. But while Bayrou may not have stumbled across the same tripwire, it’s still Le Pen who looks set to push him out on Monday.
The post The lesson from the last time Marine Le Pen knifed a French prime minister appeared first on Politico.
