François Bayrou chairs the municipal council of his town of Pau on Monday evening, during which he announced that he would retain his mandate as mayor, alongside his position as Prime Minister. This trip in the middle of the crisis to Mayotte arouses anger on the left. The new Prime Minister, mayor of Pau for ten years, had already retained his local mandate when he was briefly Minister of Justice, from May 17 to June 21, 2017. This Monday evening he defended the accumulation of mandates to “re- rooting political responsibilities in villages, neighborhoods, cities.”
Before the municipal council, François Bayrou participated remotely at 6 p.m. in the meeting of the interministerial crisis center (CIC) in Mayotte, devastated by a deadly cyclone, which will be chaired by Emmanuel Macron. This trip to Pau sparked strong reactions on the left. It is an “unworthy and disrespectful” decision (…) even though the Mayotte archipelago is going through one of the worst tragedies,” socialist deputy Arthur Delaporte denounced on X.
“No, but you have to dare!” protested environmentalist Sandrine Rousseau. “We treat the disaster with distance as if it had happened somewhere else, distant and different. Mayotte is France,” she wrote earlier. The LFI vice-president of the National Assembly, Clémence Guetté, denounced “an illegitimate part-time Prime Minister”.
According to his city’s website, Bayrou opened the municipal council session with “his news column and discussion with elected officials on these themes”, before the local executive looked into 35 issues, including that of the budget for 2025 His first deputy in Pau, Jean-Louis Peres, judged on Monday. France Blue “desirable” that François Bayrou retains this local mandate which makes it possible to “resolve the questions that the French are asking” with “very concrete matters”.
No text obliges a Prime Minister to resign from his mandate as mayor. Article 23 of the Constitution only prohibits the combination of a ministerial function with a “parliamentary” mandate. His predecessors at Matignon, Jean-Marc Ayrault, Jean Castex and Édouard Philippe, had left their chair as mayor of Nantes, Prades and Le Havre to their deputy. Conversely, Jacques Chirac remained mayor of Paris when he was Prime Minister, from 1986 to 1988.
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