PARIS — During his first speech as prime minister last Friday, François Bayrou described the challenge ahead of him as being “Himalayan.”
A few days into his new job, the 73-year-old centrist has done little to prove he’ll be able to climb the mountain.
Bayrou’s first few days at Matignon, the residence of the French prime minister, have been marred by controversy over his insistence on keeping a side job as mayor of Pau — a small city in southwestern France — and his handling of the crisis that followed the devastating cyclone in the French overseas region of Mayotte.
Even more crucially, Bayrou has so far been unable to extend his narrow base of support in France’s fragmented legislature — something he will need to accomplish to avoid the fate of his predecessor Michel Barnier whose minority government was toppled by a no-confidence backed by nearly all opposition parties.
Part-time PM, part-time mayor
Bayrou’s most glaring blunder came Monday evening when he embarked on an official government plane to attend a city council meeting in Pau. The centrist leader said he wants to remain mayor of Pau, a city with a population of 77,000, while being prime minister.
But what shocked the most, even within Bayrou’s own ranks, was the timing of his trip.
Yaël Braun-Pivet, the president of the French National Assembly and a member of the same pro-Emmanuel Macron coalition as Bayrou, said she “would have preferred that the prime minister fly to Mamoudzou instead of Pau.”
Mamoudzou is the capital of Mayotte, a French island in the Indian Ocean which has been grappling with the aftermath of tropical cyclone Chido since last weekend. Local authorities fear that hundreds, possibly thousands, may be dead.
“In this type of circumstance, we need to be 100 percent mobilized for crisis management,” Braun-Pivet added.
While the Mayotte controversy will likely blow over, what’s more concerning for Bayrou is his unsuccessful talks with other political forces.
His predecessor Barnier was backed by a narrow base of centrist and conservative lawmakers and hoped to secure tacit support from Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in order to stay in power. But Le Pen proved to be an unreliable partner as she dropped Barnier despite having secured concessions. This led to calls for the new administration not to rely on the far right.
Zero-sum game
To do so, Bayrou needs guarantees on his left.
The center-left Socialist party has expressed willingness to play along by not voting on no-confidence motions in exchange for certain concessions. But the party’s leadership came out unconvinced from a meeting with the new prime minister earlier this week.
Socialist leader Olivier Faure said Bayrou had given “no clear indication of how he intends to govern” and warned that “if there’s no change from the Barnier government, we’ll topple it in the same way.”
And while Bayrou struggles to secure support on the left, he runs the risk of losing the crucial backing of the right.
The conservative Les Républicains party, which played a key part in the Barnier administration, is debating whether or not it should join the new government.
Bruno Retailleau, a member of Les Républicains whose hard-line views on immigration made him one of the most identified figure in the previous administration, said he wants to stay on as interior minister, but that “the conditions have at this point not been met” for him to do so.
Retailleau wants to continue cracking down on immigration, both legal and illegal, and previously advocated for new legislation on this matter.
But those stances have made him a boogeyman on the left, which has warned that any new bill on immigration would push them to vote a no-confidence motion.
Bayrou is under mounting pressure to form his government in the coming days, for which he will need to carefully balance out contradictory interests.
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