Appointed less than a week ago to Matignon, François Bayrou is already at the heart of a controversy. He indeed found himself under fire on Monday by choosing to chair the municipal council in Pau while at the same time Mayotte, completely devastated, is experiencing a real tragedy.
The new Prime Minister, who has been consulting since his appointment on Friday to form a government, made the trip at the end of the day to the town in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques of which he has been mayor for ten years. Before his municipal council, he confirmed that he would remain mayor, as when he was very briefly Minister of Justice in 2017.
A “very bad” symbol
But this local meeting immediately followed that, in Paris, of the crisis unit on the situation in Mayotte after the deadly passage of Cyclone Chido, chaired by Emmanuel Macron and which the head of government therefore attended by videoconference.
Maintaining this round trip to Pau is an “unworthy and disrespectful” decision even though the overseas department is “going through one of the worst tragedies”, socialist deputy Arthur Delaporte reacted on X. For the leader of the deputies of La France insoumise, Mathilde Panot, the “symbol it sends” is “very bad”, “after 20 years of policy of abandoning Mayotte”.
Critics from all sides
But the criticism has not come only from the left. Les Républicains deputy Thibault Bazin estimated on faster to France a budget.”
“No doubt Mr. Bayrou should have done the opposite, namely obviously attending this crisis meeting and perhaps attending the municipal council remotely,” also said National Rally elected official Jean-Philippe Tanguy, while assuring that he does not want to “controversy” in the face of the catastrophe that the Indian Ocean archipelago is going through.
Our articles on the situation in Mayotte
Monday evening, Emmanuel Macron for his part announced that he would go “to Mayotte in the coming days in support” of people hit by the deadly passage of Cyclone Chido, “of civil servants and mobilized relief forces”. “It’s about facing emergencies and starting to prepare for the future,” the president said on X after the government crisis meeting. “Faced with this tragedy which upsets each of us, I will declare national mourning,” he added.
