Macron appoints Francois Bayrou France’s new prime minister: 73-year-old was acquitted of embezzlement charges earlier this year

French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday appointed François Bayrou as his fourth prime minister from 2024, tasking the veteran centrist with steering the country out of the second major political crisis of the past six months.

The priority for Bayrou, a close ally of Macron, will be to pass a special law to roll over the 2024 budget, with a nastier battle over 2025 legislation looming early next year.

Parliamentary resistance to the 2025 bill led to the fall of the government of former Prime Minister Michel Barnier.

The 73-year-old Bayrou is expected to put forward his list of ministers in the coming days but is likely to face the same existential problems as Barnier in steering legislation through a hung parliament made up of three warring blocs.

His proximity to the deeply unpopular Macron will also prove to be a vulnerability.

Jordan Bardella, the chairman of the far-right National Rally party, said they would not call for an immediate vote of no confidence against Bayrou.

France’s festering political malaise has raised doubts over whether Macron will complete his second presidential term, which ends in 2027.

It has also pushed up French borrowing costs and left a power vacuum in the heart of Europe just as Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House.

Macron (R) and Bayrou pictured in 2020

Macron spent the days after Barnier’s ouster speaking to leaders from conservatives to communists in an effort to solidify support for Bayrou.

Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally and the far-left France Unbowed were excluded.

Any Socialist Party involvement in a coalition could cost Macron next year’s budget.

“Now we will see how many billions the support of the Socialist Party will cost,” a government adviser said on Friday.

Macron will hope that Bayrou can postpone no-confidence motions until at least July, when France will be able to hold new parliamentary elections, but his own future as president will inevitably be called into question if the government were to fall again.

Bayrou, the founder of the Democratic Movement party (MoDem), which has been part of Macron’s governing alliance since 2017, has run for president three times, leaning on his rural roots as mayor of the southwestern city of Pau for many years.

Macron appointed Bayrou as justice minister in 2017, but he resigned just weeks later amid an investigation into his party’s alleged fraudulent employment of parliamentary assistants.

This year he was acquitted of fraud.

Bayrou’s first real test will come early in the new year, when lawmakers must pass a belt-tightening 2025 budget bill.

However, the fragmented nature of the National Assembly, which has become virtually ungovernable following Macron’s snap elections in June, means that Bayrou will likely have to live day to day for the foreseeable future, at the mercy of the president’s opponents.

Barnier’s budget bill, which sought €60 billion in savings to woo investors increasingly concerned about France’s 6% budget deficit, was seen as too stingy by the far right and left, and the government’s inability to Finding a way out of the impasse has led to financing costs becoming even higher