(Bloomberg) — Veteran centrist figure, Francois Bayrou, became France’s fourth prime minister in a year on Friday after President Emmanuel Macron named his longtime ally as the new head of government.
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The announcement came in a one-sentence statement from the Elysee Palace after Macron missed his own deadline for naming a new premier. The two met for nearly two hours earlier Friday.
Bayrou, 73, replaces conservative heavyweight Michel Barnier, who was ousted last week after far-right leader Marine Le Pen joined the left in a censure motion over a budget dispute.
Bayrou could face the same fate as Barnier, as France’s legislature remains divided into three blocs — a left-wing alliance, centrists and conservatives, and the far right — that do not converge on policy or political lines. France’s credit rating was downgraded by Moody’s Ratings on Saturday, which cited a “very low probability” that the next government will sustainably reduce the size of fiscal deficits beyond next year.
For now, Bayrou appears to have the tacit support of Le Pen’s party, which is the largest in parliament and thus holds outsize leverage. Shortly after Bayrou’s appointment, Jordan Bardella, the president of the far right National Rally, said his party wouldn’t back a no-confidence vote by default against a prime minister from the center or the right, implicitly giving the new head of government some room to maneuver.
Bayrou may also have some leverage with the National Rally after coming to Le Pen’s aide when she risked not having enough sponsorship from elected officials to run in the 2022 presidential election. He backed her presidential bid by giving her his formal signature as an elected official and said at the time that barring her path would have been undemocratic.
But if history is any indication, the incoming prime minister may well want to pay attention to what his predecessor learned the hard way: There is no placating Marine Le Pen. Barnier’s brief stint as premier also began with Le Pen mostly on his side, before she decided to vote him out despite securing key budgetary concessions from the outgoing prime minister.
Meanwhile, the French president’s bet is that Bayrou’s experience as an advocate of centrist French politics would allow him to build a coalition to pass the budget.
Bayrou’s first order of business would be to cobble together a cabinet with personalities that are acceptable to the widest swath of lawmakers in parliament in order to push through the 2025 budget, a key item on his agenda.
The scale of the challenge has not escaped Bayrou, who is the head of the centrist Democratic Movement party known as MoDem, which has been allied to Macron in parliament since 2017.
“I’m well aware of the Himalayan-sized difficulties we face,” Bayrou said at the handover ceremony Friday evening.
Bayrou’s appointment didn’t change the political calculus much and the markets were largely unmoved.
“It’s a total non-event, both for stocks and for the spread,” said David Kruk, head of trading at La Financiere de L’Echiquier in Paris. “No one wants to invest in France for the moment, only those who want to play end-of-year rebounds on laggard markets.”
In an unscheduled change just hours after Bayrou’s appointment, Moody’s lowered its assessment of the euro area’s second-biggest economy to Aa3 from Aa2, three levels below the maximum rating. France has already been cut to equivalent levels by Fitch and S&P. Moody’s said its view is France’s public finances will be “substantially weakened over the coming years.”
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Bayrou is a Catholic, who describes himself as having been inspired by ideas of European Christian democracy.
He was named high commissioner for planning – an unpaid position at a government think-tank he held until today – by Macron four years ago. He has also been serving as the mayor of the city of Pau in Southern France since 2014.
Bayrou’s political trajectory, in part, mirrors his new boss Macron’s playbook, as he also made an early bet in his career on building a centrist force by borrowing from the traditional right and left-wing parties. The French president entered the Elysee in 2017 after ripping up the old template of left versus right and running on a centrist campaign as a disruptor.
Bayrou, who says he speaks to Macron about three times a week on the phone, has advocated for the French to retire later, though he didn’t vote for Macron’s unpopular pension reform last year, saying it needed to be more ambitious and transformative.
Bayrou served as education minister for four years in the 1990s, in part under President Jacques Chirac. He rose to prominence during the 2002 presidential election when he advocated for more proportional voting and was caught on TV slapping a child that he had accused of putting his hands into his pockets (Bayrou later said he had acted as “a good father.”)
He ran for president in three consecutive elections starting in 2002, when he came in fourth in the first round of the election, with some 7% of the vote. Five years later, in 2007, his score rose to 19% of the vote, but fell back to 9% in 2012.
That year, he said that he would vote for Socialist candidate Francois Hollande in the second round to block conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, who was accused by centrists of stoking fears about immigration and insecurity. The two have had a tense relationship since.
During the 2017 presidential campaign, after comparing Macron to Sarkozy and calling him the candidate of “the world of great interests and money,” he rallied behind the French president and was named justice minister in his first government.
Bayrou was replaced after one month over his involvement in an ethics case. He was acquitted in February in the seven-year-long case over the fraudulent employment of parliamentary assistants by his party, paving the way for his return to government.
He has long advocated for proportional voting in the National Assembly in order to shift more power from Paris to the rest of the country. Bardella said after the news of the appointment that he expected progress on this measure – one of his party’s longtime demands.
Bayrou hasn’t given up on his presidential ambitions. Asked in 2023 about the next presidential election, when Macron can’t legally run for a third consecutive term, he said that Luiz da Silva Lula was elected president at 77. Bayrou will be 76 in 2027.
(Adds Moody’s downgrade in the fourth paragraph)
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