François Bayrou speaking during a party congress in March. Credit...Sebastien Salom-Gomis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Emmanuel Macron of France appointed François Bayrou, a veteran centrist politician and one of his top allies, as the new prime minister on Friday, as he struggles to bring the country’s protracted political turmoil and growing economic anxiety under control.
Mr. Bayrou, who becomes France’s fourth prime minister this year — an ominous record — must now form a cabinet capable of shepherding bills through a fractured, cantankerous lower house of Parliament.
Most urgently, the new government will have to finalize an emergency budget by mid-December to avoid a shutdown of essential state services.
And Mr. Bayrou must do all this without being ousted. His predecessor, Michel Barnier was toppled along with his government by a no-confidence vote last week and forced to resign after just three months in office, breaking a record for the shortest-tenured government in modern French history.
Mr. Bayrou’s chances of surviving longer than that are unclear. To do so, he must avoid a no-confidence motion supported by the left and by the far-right. That unusual pairing brought down Mr. Barnier, and their reactions to his appointment were closely scrutinized.
Jordan Bardella, the president of the nationalist, anti-immigrant far-right National Rally party, said that it was waiting to see how the new government would proceed.
“Our red lines remain,” Mr. Bardella told reporters in Paris. “The ball is now in François Bayrou’s court.”
The reaction from the New Popular Front, an alliance of left-wing parties, revealed a lack of consensus.
Representatives of France Unbowed, a leftist party that is one of the alliance’s main drivers, immediately rejected Mr. Bayrou as an extension of Mr. Macron and his pro-business policies.
