It was just a few months ago. In a small committee, the president of MoDem, François Bayrou, admitted that he was not always heard by Emmanuel Macron. But, he said, I “have this weakness to appreciate the head of state. This intellectual, perhaps emotional complicity, established since the centrist’s support for Emmanuel Macron during the 2017 presidential campaign, was suddenly damaged on the evening of Wednesday February 7.
A bloodthirsty or political blow, François Bayrou made it known that he refused to join Gabriel Attal’s government in a statement to Agence France-Presse. “The Prime Minister offered me the Ministry of the Armed Forces, but defense is the sector which, in French politics, is doing the best in my eyes,” he clarified. “There were two areas which seemed to me to deserve full commitment: the Ministry of Education, which today is experiencing a crisis of confidence that comes from afar and which I believed could be corrected. But numerous discussions have led me to conclude that there is a difference in approach on the method to follow which seems prohibitive to me”explained the mayor of Pau, the other area being “the gulf that has opened up between the province and Paris”. But, “without a deep agreement on the policy to follow, I could not agree to enter the government”.
“After seven years of unconditional support for Emmanuel Macron, Mr. Bayrou suddenly discovers that he disagrees with the government’s above-ground policy,” mocks, on X, Olivier Marleix, the leader of the Les Républicains group in the National Assembly.
“Humiliation”
In the evening, during a dinner at the Ministry of Agriculture, led by Marc Fesneau, close to François Bayrou, the Béarnais became more scathing, denouncing in front of around forty MoDem deputies “a process of humiliation that is imposed on us”. Completing: “What is happening here is deeper than usual. The more things progress, the further away I see the ideal of a rapprochement between those who govern and those being governed. » The boss of the centrist party, who believes that Emmanuel Macron owes him his victory in 2017, judges that his party is not being treated fairly. The question of maintaining MoDem representatives in government would have been raised on Wednesday evening, suggesting the opening of an unprecedented political crisis within a presidential camp already fractured since the vote on the “immigration” law in December 2023 .
“There is always a balance of power in this kind of thing,” we put things into perspective at the Elysée, where we imagine François Bayrou seeking to have influence within a government which currently has very right-wing accents. Faced with this event, Emmanuel Macron himself maintains a “ cold blood “ coupled to “the desire for governmental solidity”, according to one of his advisors.
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