Cruel policy… Barely having been appointed Prime Minister, having just managed to create – not without difficulty – his government, François Bayrou’s time is already numbered. It is not so much the fault of his repeated blunders in the early hours of his mission (his controversial trip to Pau, his idea of returning to the non-cumulation of mandates or his words on Mayotte “not in France”), than a political state of affairs. The dissolution desired by Emmanuel Macron and his refusal to submit to cohabitation can only give rise to chimeras. A question, so simple in appearance, arises for François Bayrou: what meaning should be given to his task?
The Socialist Party nevertheless offered him a way of passage, thin and icy certainly, but a way of passage all the same: Olivier Faure’s roses hammered home their refusal to participate in a government, but said they were open to a pact of non-censorship in exchanges of guarantees (the suspension of pension reform and the establishment of a financing conference, public services or even purchasing power). Impossible for Bayrou because impossible for the central bloc, which the Prime Minister needs to hold on as best he can.
So for everything to change, must nothing change? Here he is, captain of an Areopagus similar in every way to that of Michel Barnier, the object of which is difficult to perceive. Bayrou, like a good centrist, hoped that overcoming divisions, by recruiting personalities from all sides, would be life insurance, but without a coalition contract, what’s the point? It is the illusion of a gathering that prevails. It is not because we come from the right or the left that we are still one of the shepherds of one or the other. Take Manuel Valls, the former socialist Prime Minister who became Minister of Overseas Territories: is he still on the left? Not in the eyes of the NFP, where we swear we know what is or is not (left). His failure after the left-wing primary in 2017, his wanderings abroad, his repeated offers of services to Emmanuel Macron have made him a centrist like any other.
Drama of centrism
On the other side, on the right, it is Laurent Wauquiez who is now threatening to no longer support this new government. It doesn’t matter that Bayrou has fulfilled a right-wing fantasy: appointing two of his champions to the Interior and Justice, Bruno Retailleau and Gérald Darmanin. A proof of love which would prove François Mitterrand right for whom the center was only “a soft variety of the right.” The Prime Minister hastened to calm the ardor of a drunken right: “What Bruno Retailleau wants is not my road map”.
Right or left? And of both? Neither? François Bayrou blurs and gets confused, one step here, another there and two aside. It is the drama of this old political family, as defined by Olivier Todd, the former editorialist and editor-in-chief of L’Express who has just left us, regarding another centrist, Edgar Faure: “True centrist, its circumference is everywhere and its center nowhere. It is at the zenith of a fairly low horizon.