Expected to return to a ministerial portfolio after his acquittal in the affair of the assistants of European parliamentarians on Monday, François Bayrou announced Wednesday February 7 in a statement to Agence France-Presse (AFP) that he “will not enter the government” due to lack of “deep agreement on the policy to follow.”
The appointment of the second half of the government of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has been expected for several days, and its announcement is constantly postponed. Since the court decision on Monday, Mr. Bayrou had not hidden his desire to return to government – his name was circulating in particular for national education in place of Amélie Oudéa-Castéra. “There are many ways to serve, I have eliminated none and chosen none,” he said Tuesday morning on BFM-TV.
In his statement to AFP, Mr. Bayrou ensures that “there were two areas which seemed to me to deserve full commitment: the Ministry of National Education” and “the gulf which has widened between the province and Paris ". “We were unable to find an agreement on these two points,” summarized the mayor of Pau, who said he also declined the Ministry of the Armed Forces. The president of MoDem, whose group in the National Assembly belongs to the presidential coalition with Renaissance and Horizons, was received for an hour by the President of the Republic on Monday and had lunch for more than two hours with Gabriel Attal on Tuesday.
A “crippling” difference in approach
On the ministry currently occupied by Ms. Oudéa-Castera, Mr. Bayrou believes that he “is today experiencing a crisis that comes from afar and that 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.” The MoDem currently has a ministerial portfolio with Marc Fesneau in agriculture. “An increasingly relative majority! Welcome to MoDem in opposition,” quipped Wednesday evening on his X account, the president of the socialist group in the National Assembly, Boris Vallaud.
The mayor of Pau, 72, was appointed in 2017 to the ministry of justice in the first government of Emmanuel Macron before resigning a month later due to the opening of an investigation into the affair of the assistants of European parliamentarians from MoDem. He was acquitted almost seven years later, on Monday February 5, by the Paris criminal court. “The mechanism of justice is such, it is so cumbersome, you do not have the means to defend yourself,” he regretted on Tuesday on BFM-TV, recalling in particular that “it is extremely expensive”.
