The threats hanging over Bayrou’s government

Prime Minister François Bayrou is one of the great survivors of French politics, but his 40-year political career had achieved little until earlier this month.

Successfully steering a deficit-cutting budget for 2025 though a National Assembly splintered into 11 political groups and three mutually antagonistic camps, the centrist prime minister has now succeeded where his predecessor Michel Barnier failed.

And Bayrou has since told colleagues he thinks he’ll be safe until the summer.

He does anticipate a new political crisis in the early fall, and the months of September and October will probably be the most dangerous. But if Bayrou can survive until the end of the year, it looks like he can likely hang on until the end of President Emmanuel Macron’s second and final term in May 2027.

This is because starting early next year, or perhaps even sooner, political energies in France will be diverted toward important municipal elections in cities, towns and villages, which are set to take place in May 2026. Once those are over, the unofficial, pre-campaign period for the 2027 presidential election will kick off, and the pressure for new parliamentary elections will recede.

Before then, however, there are still a few unresolved issues that could topple Bayrou before year’s end. 

The first is immigration. Bayrou’s hardline Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau is pushing for tougher legislation on legal and illegal migration, and some of his rhetoric has disturbed both the left and the Macronist part of Bayrou’s coalition. The prime minister, for his part, has attempted a tactic of diversion by calling for a debate on “national identity,” but the topic remains volatile.

However, since the National Assembly is broadly split between the far right, the governing center and the left, bringing Bayou down would require an alliance between opposition leader Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally and the left — which is rather unlikely when it comes to immigration. So, while the matter will remain unsolved, it doesn’t pose the most imminent threat to the government’s survival.
 
The second danger facing Bayrou is the budget. The prime minister acknowledges that his 2025 budget was only a stopgap response to the country’s deficit crisis. He has thus ordered all ministries to set aside taboos and conventional wisdom, and closely reexamine spending and taxes before he presents his draft 2026 budget in September.

This budget is particularly tricky, as it is an issue on which the far right and the left could come together to defeat Bayrou — just as they formed a de facto pact that brought down Barnier over his budget in December.

Finally, the third and most dangerous unresolved issue facing Bayrou is pension reform. This is a rod Bayrou made for his own back, having agreed to reopen talks on Macron’s painfully won 2023 pension reform in order to persuade the Socialists to begin negotiations on the 2025 budget.

Bayrou reopened the door to reconsidering the increase in the basic pension age from 62 to 64, when the Socialists dug their heels in on the budget — his only stipulation was that the outcome be neutral in terms of state spending and the deficit. The prime minister also acceded to refer any “progress” in discussions to parliament, whether talks between unions and employers succeed or fail.

But this is a classic example of the solution to one impasse creating a different intractable problem, as there’s simply no practical way to abandon the rise in pension age without increasing the deficit. And while the Socialists think they’ve now cleared the way to radically softer pension legislation in the fall, the government privately insists that only cosmetic changes are possible.

Meanwhile, Le Pen’s far right is just as unrealistic in its thinking on the matter — as is the majority of the public.

A pension crisis is therefore likely by late summer or September, and of all the unresolved issues confronting Bayrou, it is the one that could unseat him. The prime minister did, indeed, display great ingenuity and patience in resolving the budget dispute this year, but finding a creative solution to the pension showdown will prove much more arduous.