Only four days after his arrival at Matignon, François Bayrou is already criticized from all sides. It all started with an express return trip to Pau, the city of which he has been mayor since 2014, on Monday evening. So in full consultations with a view to forming his government and just before a crisis meeting, which he only attended by videoconference, on the situation in Mayotte after the deadly passage of Cyclone Chido, François Bayrou spoke went to Pau to chair the municipal council. The new Prime Minister intends to remain mayor and thus serve two mandates.
“You should not have gone to Pau to retain a mandate, but to the crisis meeting at the Élysée to assume your new role,” launched the head of the La France insoumise deputies, Mathilde Panot, when her socialist counterpart , Boris Vallaud, criticized François Bayrou for having also taken advantage of it to unwelcomely promote “cumulative mandates”. The number one of the Socialist Party Olivier Faure estimated on France 2 that “the Prime Minister is losing his way”. The national secretary of the Communist Party Fabien Roussel judged it “totally indecent to talk about multiple mandates […] while at the moment we are burying children, residents in Mayotte.”
Tuesday morning, even the President of the Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, although belonging to François Bayrou’s camp, confided that she would have “preferred that the Prime Minister, instead of taking a plane to Pau, took the plane for Mamoudzou”, capital of Mayotte. “A somewhat baroque sequence”, judged with a relatively lenient tone Marine Le Pen in The Parisian. The new Prime Minister justified himself by invoking the need not to “separate the province and the circle of powers in Paris”, one of his hobby horses.
Mayotte “not in France”
“Pau is in France […] I chaired the municipal council of my city from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. I consider that, in doing so, I was also in my place as a citizen and I intend to defend this idea”, defended the Béarnais before the deputies in the National Assembly on Tuesday afternoon. Adding, to justify the fact that he had not planned to go to Mayotte in the coming days, that Emmanuel Macron would indeed make the trip “It is not customary for the President and the Prime Minister to leave. at the same time the national territory”, he said, suggesting that Mayotte was not a French department.
The confusion went almost unnoticed at the time, but the controversy swelled in the evening, when opposition deputies questioned him, particularly on social networks. “Mr. Bayrou: Mayotte is France. What a shame,” reacted Clémence Guetté, the rebellious vice-president of the Assembly. “Mayotte would not be on national territory according to Bayrou. We understand better why he preferred to attend the Pau municipal council. Shipwreck,” lamented communist senator Ian Brossat. “A new blunder from the Prime Minister,” also regretted National Rally MP Caroline Parmentier on the same social network. Last night, during a special evening on France 2, the Prime Minister finally announced that he would go to the archipelago as soon as his government was formed, in order to “mobilize all of the State’s resources”.
Still no government
Before this appearance on France 2, François Bayrou went to the Élysée for the second time that day to discuss with Emmanuel Macron the composition of the government, after two days of consultations with political groups. Inconclusive so far, these continue this Wednesday in Matignon.
Laurent Wauquiez, the leader of the Les Républicains deputies, received on Monday, thus requested a new meeting with the head of government, whose project is still “too vague” in his eyes. Coming out of their interview with the new Prime Minister, the Ecologists felt that French Bayrou was already “little by little paving the way to his own censorship”. At the end of an interview described as “frank”, the communists for their part indicated that they would decide whether or not to censor the Prime Minister based on “the content” of his general policy speech on January 14. On the side of the RN, the threat was also clearly stated this Wednesday morning: “If François Bayrou does not take into account the errors that Michel Barnier may have made, both in form and in substance, he will also head towards the same consequences, that is to say sooner or later towards censorship”, warned the vice-president of the flame party Sébastien Chenu.
Even within the central bloc, although supposed to support him, the Prime Minister’s debut is considered “chaotic” or even “worrying”. “We feel that there is hesitation”, described on the microphone of RMC a good connoisseur of Matignon.