PARIS (Reuters) – The political lone rider of François Bayrou, who delayed the reshuffle by refusing to enter the government, isolates him within the MoDem and weakens an already shaky majority at a decisive moment for Emmanuel Macron.
The centrist mayor of Pau undermined the Meccano of the executive by making public on Wednesday evening his refusal of a ministerial portfolio within the government of Gabriel Attal, while the list of delegated ministers and secretaries of state, awaited since more than three weeks, was about to be finalized.
A refusal as virulent as it was unexpected for lack of a “deep agreement on the policy to follow”, he underlined in a statement sent to Agence France-Presse.
His acquittal on Monday in the affair of the MoDem parliamentary assistants had seemed to clear the political horizons of the centrist leader, but the Paris prosecutor’s office plunged him back into legal troubles on Thursday by appealing this judgment of the criminal court.
The president of the Democratic Movement explained Thursday on franceinfo that he would have liked to take charge of National Education, a position he held from 1993 to 1997, or a portfolio comparable to regional planning, “two sectors which are incredibly significant of this loss of confidence that we are going through. He said he had ruled out the Ministry of the Armed Forces, “the only sector (…) which is doing relatively well”.
In his statement on Wednesday evening, the High Commissioner for Planning was moved by the “chasm that has opened up between the province and Paris”.
“I will not allow a certain number of excesses to take place which are based on ignorance by those responsible at the top of what the French are experiencing at the grassroots,” François Bayrou insisted on Thursday, worried about witnessing a “progression of extremes “.
“INEPT”
The former minister, who had expressed his reservations about the appointment of Gabriel Attal to Matignon, deplored that the government has, out of 14 full-time ministers, “11 ministers from Paris or the Ile-de-France region and not a single one from the south of the Loire” .
The Béarnais’s coup not only thwarted the efforts of the executive to compose a government reflecting the balance of the majority (the MoDem has 51 deputies), but sowed consternation within his party.
The Hauts-de-Seine MP Jean-Louis Bourlanges echoed with rare virulence the unrest running through the MoDem ranks by denouncing in a press release on Thursday a “politically inept and morally degrading” decision taken “without consultation”.
“If we were really not satisfied with the place offered to us, it would have been possible to practice support without participation. We are in the process of choosing the opposite: participation without support. Which amounts to dangerously weakening our camp while discrediting ourselves,” he laments.
In a long exercise of justification, which did not escape the paradox, François Bayrou assured on franceinfo that the centrist elected officials, supporters of Emmanuel Macron since 2017, were “full members of the majority which wants to rebuild the country”.
“LOYAL”
Elected officials who broke their silence on Thursday to disavow, in chosen terms, the initiative of their mentor.
“We assume our role as watchdog so that the commitments made to the French in 2017 and reaffirmed in 2022 are kept, so that the majority remains the majority,” we can read in a MoDem press release, with this slogan: “Loyal, vigilant and unifying”.
The Minister of Agriculture Marc Fesneau, for the moment the only centrist representative of the government, echoed this declaration of allegiance by emphasizing on X that the MoDem would continue its work “in support of the action of Gabriel Attal and Emmanuel Macron.
Aged 72, the mayor of Pau, who has already run for the Elysée three times, has indicated his desire to run in the 2027 presidential election.
“It’s not me who sets the date for the presidential election, it’s the country. Open your eyes to what we are going through (…). The challenge of 2027 is that “we are able to reconcile France which fights at the bottom with France which decides at the top”, he argued.
“I want to tell him ‘Welcome to the opposition’,” the president of the Les Républicains (LR) group in the Assembly, Olivier Marleix, quipped Thursday on franceinfo. For Xavier Bertrand, president of Hauts-de-France, the country is going through “a major political crisis”.
“One of the pillars of the majority clearly shows that he is no longer in phase with the executive,” he argued on TF1.
Jean-Daniel Lévy, deputy director of the Harris Interactive polling institute, puts things into perspective.
“We would be in a crisis if Bayrou had ever said that he was entering the opposition, if he stopped supporting the executive, if his ministers left the government,” he explained to Reuters.
“There is an exacerbated tension. Bayrou (…) is not a central person in the majority who is leaving the government either. He is a big thorn in the side of the executive,” he believes. -he.
(Written by Jean-Stéphane Brosse and Sophie Louet, with contributions from Elizabeth Pineau)
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