In January 2024, François Bayrou is not happy. Gabriel Attal has been appointed Prime Minister and he hates this well-bred young man – but only in appearance. So he said to the president: “I don’t understand this choice, for the first time I don’t understand you.” In the long run, Emmanuel Macron knows his Béarnais: “No, you already told me the same thing about Edouard Philippe.” The reply is not long in coming: “And who was right?”
In December 2024, François Bayrou is happy. Finally. When the train, once again, passed under his nose with Michel Barnier, he sighed: “He hasn’t been in politics for fifteen years, that’s lost in three months.” This is a reproach that we cannot make of him, he who has been, is and will always be immersed in politics up to his neck. It’s a job! He knows how to speak. “The coffers are empty, we have to find the words,” he confided before the summer. He knows how to talk to others – he is one of the rare ones to do so with everyone, with the exception of Nicolas Sarkozy. With Bernard Cazeneuve, with François Hollande, with Robert Ménard even, the mayor of Béziers for a time close to Marine Le Pen. It also did not escape his attention that some of his sentences were used by François Ruffin in a leaflet for his campaign for the legislative elections.
At the end of the 1980s, the very young Bayrou went to rue de Bénouville, to the home of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. It’s the first time. So he took his courage in both hands: “Mr. President, do you know why you no longer have friends? You treat people, they are in ecstasy and then nothing. Love turns into hatred. ” For a long time he has enjoyed comparing the similarities between the two youngest heads of state of the Fifth Republic and in particular this frame of mind which leads them to believe that because we have an idea in mind, it will come true.
Holy misunderstanding
Because François Bayrou got to know his Macron, since the first angry SMS that he sent him in July 2016 because he accused him of having immediately leaked the dinner during which the two men had met. . He knows his taste for blows – “These are generations marked by the media and the need to impress.” He has again feared one in recent days, which would have been likely to derail his nomination to Matignon. Above all, he knows his propensity to refuse the idea that a solution must always exist somewhere so that Emmanuel Macron does not lose power. Not completely, not for long.
Yes, he knows him so he has not forgotten certain conversations, tasty in hindsight, when the president wanted to abolish the function of Prime Minister. This is so contrary to François Bayrou’s entire construction: he believes in a head of government who is not an executive, who has a real role. “With me, cohabitation would be harder!”, he liked to say, bravado, before it was his time. Because when the Palois has an idea in mind, he doesn’t have it elsewhere. He remains a defender of a classic reading of institutions: the executive and Parliament must be disconnected, which is why he rejects the term coalition: it is not the parties which decide on ministers, otherwise “it is not no longer a government, they are delegations. This means that the new series of consultations launched by the president, who had sworn that he would not do so, goes against Béarn’s reading of the Constitution – a hell of a misunderstanding as a first step for the new executive couple.
Leave and come back. François Bayrou is a veteran of National Education. It is almost 11 p.m. on Sunday January 16, 1994. In the afternoon, a million people marched in Paris to protest against the revision of the Falloux law (on the financing of private education by local authorities) . The ministry is almost deserted, the switchboard rings. And who picks up? François Bayrou, this young minister who already dreams of being president and feels that day the wind is passing. Now he no longer picks up, he hangs on: he will always remember that he almost tripped just as he began his march to power. This will not encourage him to multiply the races, he the follower of Churchillian no-sport, as long as he is on rue de Bellechasse, between 1993 and 1997. He will succeed in burying one of the flagship promises of the candidate Chirac, a referendum on the school, because he didn’t like the idea.
Upset relationship with Alexis Kohler
More recently, it was Alexis Kohler’s designs for the single college and the teachers that he managed to break. End of the 2022 presidential campaign, during a working dinner at the Elysée, François Bayrou discovers two projects from the team which is developing, with the secretary general of the Elysée, candidate Macron’s program: early orientation or the possibility of building an à la carte college and the indexing of teachers’ remuneration on the achievement of good results by their students. He rears up, growls and wins his case.
Contradicting the “president’s brain” is ultimately the only sport that Bayrou practices with enthusiasm. “I have never had any personal problem with Kohler, I have a political problem quite often, he usually trumpets. He does not like my influence, he has done everything to thwart it, ten times. ” Between them, the mayor of Pau and the technocrat, the story stumbles from the first moments on the proportionality that the first demands as much as the second buries it, giving the first the opportunity to accuse the second of “not understanding anything about”. But the problem, ultimately, is not that. The real scandal, thinks François Bayrou, is that Alexis Kohler has “the upper hand over the State and over Emmanuel Macron”, making the latter “a president under influence”. Worse, he has managed, over the years and Prime Ministers, to extinguish his influence. Elisabeth Borne, Gabriel Attal… pure telegraphers of the Kohlerian administration. Let no one count on him to be “the guy who copies what Kohler tells him.”
From now on, François Bayrou is Prime Minister, and the Elysée had better watch out. Who remembers these words from a Macronie pundit: “Bayrou is in the cart of those whom the French no longer want”? It was 2017, it seems since the promise of dawn has lived.
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