François Bayrou named France’s prime minister

PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron has picked François Bayrou to be France’s prime minister, the Elysée said in a statement.

Bayrou, a longtime figure of French centrist politics and one of Macron’s earliest supporters, was long seen as front runner after lawmakers from the far right and left united to torpedo Michel Barnier’s government last week as he tried to pass a slimmed-down social security budget to rein in the country’s massive deficit.

Bayrou and Macron met for nearly two hours Friday morning. French media initially reported that the meeting was tense and Bayrou’s odds of getting the job had diminished.

The choice appeared to be debated until the last minute. Macron missed a self-imposed deadline to name a new premier by Thursday, before his office told reporters that a new prime minister would be named Friday morning. The statement from the Élysée was emailed to reporters shortly before 1 p.m. in Paris.

Macron’s decision came so late that employees at the Matignon palace, the residency of the French prime minister, had rolled out the red carpet but could not determine what height they should set up the new PM’s microphone for the official transfer ceremony later in the day, a journalist on the scene from Agence France Presse said on X. 

However, it’s unclear how the 73-year-old Bayrou will be able to avoid the same fate as his predecessor, as France’s legislature remains fractured between three roughly equal blocks — left-wing, center-right and far-right — who have so far not shown little willingness to work together. 

Barnier attempted to thread that needle and keep his government afloat by securing the tacit support of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, which worked for a time. The far-right party wielded an unprecedented amount of influence in policymaking and secured some key concessions in budget negotiations, but Le Pen eventually withdrew her party’s support for Barnier’s government over his budget plans.

Bayrou’s immediate challenge will be to form a government that isn’t immediately taken down by the opposition in parliament, especially considering it is unlikely to include ministers from outside the narrow coalition of pro-Macron and conservative MPs of the previous cabinet.

The hard-left France Unbowed has already vowed to bring forward a no-confidence motion against Bayrou, though Marine Tondelier, the head of the Greens and a prominent voice in the French center-left, said her party would wait — but that it would have “no other choice” but to topple the new prime minister if he keeps in place Macron-era policies and outgoing ministers in key roles.

National Rally President Jordan Bardella called on Bayrou to engage with opposition parties but said that the premier held “no democratic legitimacy or majority” and that the party’s red lines which brought down Barnier had not changed.

Bayrou, now finally in a post he has eyed for years, has proven himself to be a political survivor. The 73-year-old from southwest France has already held two high-ranking positions in government, serving as education minister under conservative Prime Minister Edouard Balladur in the 1990s and a brief stint as justice minister immediately after Macron’s election in 2017 — a job he was forced to resign after less than a month when he was placed under formal investigation for allegedly embezzling European Parliament funds. 

At the time, Macron’s policy was that no one under formal investigation could be kept in government, a rule the president has since given up on. 

Bayrou was eventually acquitted due to reasonable doubt, though prosecutors have appealed that decision. Other members of his centrist party — which is aligned with Macron’s — were sentenced to fines and suspended prison sentences after having been found guilty of paying party employees as parliamentary assistants to MEPs. Le Pen is currently on trial over similar allegations that threaten to derail her presidential ambitions. She has repeatedly maintained her innocence. 

Sarah Paillou and Clea Caulcutt contributed to this report