The scene takes place on November 8, 2018. The European campaign then begins timidly. In Pau that day, where France Insoumise is holding one of its meetings, Jean-Luc Mélenchon arrived a little earlier than expected to respond to François Bayrou’s invitation. Funny companionship, rebellious and populist on one side, Christian Democrat and support of Emmanuel Macron on the other. Assumed political adversaries. The mayor and short-lived Keeper of the Seals pulled out all the stops for his Republican welcome. He recites the history of his city from the balcony of his huge office, with a breathtaking view of the misty Pyrenees. A photographer immortalizes the scenes: Jean-Luc and François at the Saint-Louis theater, in front of a painting of Henri IV, the hero of the Pau city councilor, the host dedicating to his guest a copy of his book on the “good king Henry.” The political beasts, those of the “world before Emmanuel Macron”, of which they are, know how to sniff each other out.
Here are two that look so similar, Primus interparum du Modem and La France insoumise, “Molière” of politics, three presidential elections each, all lost. “There is only Modem from François Bayrou” smiles a close friend of the Béarnais. And the only France rebellious is Jean-Luc Mélenchon. While Mélenchon was preparing his departure from the PS in 2008, he had a secret lunch with Bayrou to understand how the latter succeeded in his break with the right to give birth to Modem. Between the two men, a cultural community and principles. There are shared battles like proportional representation; their common ambiguities too, like their call for a Sixth Republic, they who only reason with the codes of the Fifth.
And the rest, less assumed. In 2017, when the affair of the fictitious jobs of Modem parliamentary assistants paid by the European Parliament pushed Bayrou to leave the Chancellery, he received the support of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. “The trial against Bayrou is disgusting,” he recently confided to L’Express. The centrist will return the favor when the rebel will be at the center of another political-financial affair concerning his campaign accounts, in 2018. Bayrou and Mélenchon, inveterate Pater familias, head of a clan rather than a party. Thus, when Adrien Quatennens, judged guilty of having slapped his wife, will be staunchly defended by Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2022, Bayrou will not judge him: “I would never let go of Marc Fesneau (Editor’s note: his designated heir, lieutenant of lieutenants)…”
“I listen to what Mélenchon says with interest”
They have their differences. Sound and fury for one, compromise and roundness for the other. During the 2007 presidential election, the socialist candidate Ségolène Royal considered a rapprochement with the centrist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, PS senator at the time, took the lead of a small group of PS elected officials to torpedo Bayrou and prevent the rapprochement, weighing down Royal’s campaign a little more. Rebelote in 2011. He is the candidate of the Left Party for the presidential election which is coming this time, and he urges the three favorites in the primary to clarify their positions vis-à-vis the MoDem. Martine Aubry manages Lille with centrists, François Hollande considers that we should not reject the centrist out of hand and Ségolène Royal wants a “rainbow” campaign, from humanist centrists to the Gaullists. “The socialists think that they can, in a kind of complete ambiguity, have both Mr. Bayrou and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in a coalition. I tell them: this is not possible, we cannot imagine the ‘one and the other together’, he will thunder. Five years later, kindnesses from one to the other. “I listen to what Mélenchon says with interest,” says the Palois. And the rebellious: “he embodies the intermediate solution: he is a literary person who does not speak the metallic language of techno, he speaks to the middle classes, he can do Pompidou.”
François Bayrou, newly appointed Prime Minister on December 13, 2024, Jean-Luc Mélenchon contented himself with a mocking message on the social network Attal and Michel Barnier, the last three tenants of Matignon. Mélenchon has another target, it is not his friend from Pau, but Emmanuel Macron. His rebels have already set the tone. “Bayrou: censorship. Macron: resignation”, summarizes LFI deputy Antoine Léaument, former Modem activist. An intransigence which is not that of the socialists. In a letter voted unanimously from his national office, the First Secretary Olivier Faure indicated to the new Prime Ministers that they will remain “in opposition to Parliament”, recalling his loyalty to the “proposals defended before the voters of the New Front popular.” The roses, which rest on the table the need for “indispensable guarantees to avoid further censorship”, including the renunciation of the use of 49.3 and the pension reform. So many “red lines” that Bayrou does not ignore, he who knows the socialists just as well. They had thanked him in their own way for his support for François Hollande against Nicolas Sarkozy during the second round of the 2012 presidential election, by opposing him to a candidate, Nathalie Chabanne, during the legislative elections which followed. She will steal the deputy’s seat from him and, ironically, will be the first of France’s rebels, from 2012.
“If he launches proportional, we will like him”
In recent weeks, Bayrou and his centrist flock have been busy with more than one socialist. The idea of a non-censorship agreement, launched by the leader of the PS deputies Boris Vallaud, resonates in the ears of the Modem. His lieutenant Marc Fesneau, president of the group, is thus judged as a “facilitator” by certain socialists. Political landing strips are imagined on the Modem side, which do not displease some PS deputies: the freezing of pension reform and a financing conference with the social partners, the taxation of high incomes. Former president-turned-MP François Hollande has thus been able to speak with Fesneau on several occasions in recent weeks. If the PS recalled that none of them could participate in Bayrou’s future government, the socialist deputy for Meurthe-et-Moselle Dominique Potier, for his part, assumes his openness, and would almost make an offer of services: “I speak regularly with Marc Fesneau. In recent weeks, we have changed on fundamental issues, on what a Prime Minister could do on agricultural issues. I have a very great affinity with them.
Fesneau who found an attentive ear in the leader of the communist group André Chassaigne and his environmentalist counterpart Cyrielle Chatelain. Other green deputies, including Éva Sas and Jérémie Iordanoff, admit privately that they will not remain insensitive to possible outstretched hands from the centrists, but not from there to accepting a ministerial portfolio. A tolerance that would not be achieved at any price. Green senator Yannick Jadot is not the most frightened by the new Prime Minister. The two men like each other, and had even considered together a joint initiative on proportional representation. “If he launches the proportional system, we will like him”, whispers today those around Jadot.
Recruiting left-wing figures into his new government, an impossible mission for François Bayrou. The NFP refuses, although socialists and ecologists are not opposed to tolerance. He could turn to Bernard Cazeneuve, and his movement La Convention. Since the summer, he has multiplied the signs of affection towards his distant predecessor at Matignon. The two men met twice last week to discuss ways to end the crisis. Bayrou and Cazeneuve, the latter on his way back from a professional trip to Morocco, planned to talk over the weekend. Friday morning, before Emmanuel Macron, the Palois still pleaded for his nomination if he himself was not chosen.
Former PS David Habib, one of the leaders of the Convention, puts up a brave face against bad luck: “I have known François for thirty years: he is not a pure and hardline Macronist. He has his own autonomy.” A cooperation which is no guarantee of sustainability for the new Prime Minister. “Its stability will depend on our ability to wrest useful victories from the French, warns a PS executive. When we say non-censorship agreement, there is agreement in it. So if there is no agreement, it “There is censorship.”
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