Bayrou under fire from critics, meeting with Macron

(Keystone-ATS) According to his entourage, the new Prime Minister spoke at the end of the morning for “more than an hour” with the Head of State at the Elysée.

Objective, according to Marc Fesneau: to evoke a “start-up architecture” for his government. The president of the MoDem deputies added that the two heads of the executive will compose the future team with “the desire to find a balance”.

The new tenant of Matignon hopes to train his team “by the end of the week”, according to parliamentary sources. It is his intention to present around 25 people, it was added.

Then, he will deliver his general policy declaration to Parliament on January 14.

All-round agitation

In the meantime, the Prime Minister is preparing to give his first major oral speech from 3:00 p.m. at the National Assembly. He will answer questions from MPs for 45 minutes. Alone, since the ministers in place have resigned and are therefore not authorized to participate in the exercise.

The former Macronist Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, will question him in particular on Mayotte and “the exceptional means that the State must employ”.

At the same time, consultations with political forces, which began on Monday, continue in Matignon.

The president of the Horizons deputies, Laurent Marcangeli, pleaded for “stability” with the Prime Minister, who had already spoken by telephone with Edouard Philippe on Sunday.

The leaders of the Ecologists were much more pessimistic, believing that Mr. Bayrou was already “little by little paving the way to his own censorship”.

As for Laurent Wauquiez (LR), received on Monday, he requested a new meeting on Tuesday with the head of government, whose project is still “too vague” in his eyes.

Barely four days after his appointment, the president of MoDem is already at the heart of a double controversy.

His choice to go to his town of Pau to defend his position as mayor, rather than attend a crisis meeting on Mayotte, which he followed remotely, arouses strong criticism even in his own camp.

His idea of ​​once again authorizing the accumulation of local mandates for parliamentarians, in order to “re-root” them in the territories, is also denounced, as well as his desire to retain the town hall of Pau, in parallel with Matignon.

“Indecent”

The President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, did not spare him. She would have “preferred that the Prime Minister, instead of taking a plane to Pau, took the plane to Mamoudzou”, the capital of Mayotte, devastated by a deadly cyclone.

As for the accumulation of mandates, “this is really not the time” to “put this subject back on the table”. “Today, the subject is the budget, it’s Mayotte.”

The boss of the Communist Party Fabien Roussel, for his part, considered it “indecent to talk about multiple mandates (…) when at the moment we are burying children, residents” in the battered archipelago. The First Secretary of the PS, Olivier Faure, estimated that the founder of the MoDem “lost his way” by taking up such a subject.

A rare voice to come to the Prime Minister’s rescue, Hervé Marseille, head of the centrist senators and defender of cumulation, estimated that Mr. Bayrou “did what he had to do”.

For its part, the National Rally defends the idea of ​​combining the mandates of deputy and mayor “below a certain threshold” of population. An opportunity for Marine Le Pen’s party to strengthen the local network of its numerous deputies.

As for the accumulation of a ministerial function and a local mandate, nothing prohibits it in the law.

Ms. Braun-Pivet, however, recalled that a constitutional reform, unfinished and providing for “the non-cumulation of ministerial functions and a local executive”, had been “voted almost unanimously” by deputies in 2018.

“By clinging” to his position as mayor of Pau, Mr. Bayrou “made a serious error” coupled with an “important political mistake” and “symbolically dramatic”, denounced the coordinator of La France insoumise, Manuel Bompard.