New
French Prime Minister François Bayrou off to a nightmarish start
Bayrou’s
decision to stay on as mayor of a small city has drawn controversy as he
struggles to negotiate with opposition parties.
December 18,
2024 4:17 pm CET
By Victor
Goury-Laffont
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.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário