The veteran centrist politician Francois Bayrou became France’s fourth prime minister in a year on Friday, after President Emmanuel Macron appointed his longtime ally as the new head of government, as noted by the Bloomberg agency.

The announcement was made in a brief statement. The two met for nearly two hours earlier on Friday.

Bayrou, 73, replaces Michel Barnier, who was ousted last week after the far-right leader Marine Le Pen joined the left in a motion of censure over a budget dispute.

Bayrou could face the same fate as Barnier, as France’s legislature remains divided into three blocs – a leftist alliance, centrists and conservatives and the far right – that do not converge on political lines. France’s creditworthiness was downgraded by Moody’s rating agency, which cited a “very low probability” that the next government will steadily reduce the size of budget deficits beyond next year.

For now, Bayrou appears to have the tacit support of Le Pen’s party, which is the largest in parliament and therefore wields enormous influence. Shortly after Bayrou’s appointment, Jordan Bardela, the president of the far-right National Rally party, said his party would not support a vote of no confidence by default against a prime minister from the center or the right, implicitly giving the new head of government some room for maneuver.

Bayrou may also have some influence in the National Rally, having helped Le Pen when she was in danger of not having enough sponsorship from elected officials to run in the 2022 presidential election. He supported her presidential candidacy by giving her his official signature as an elected official and he declared at the time that blocking her path would be undemocratic.

But if history is instructive, the new prime minister might want to heed what his predecessor learned the hard way: There’s no way to appease Marine Le Pen. Barnier’s brief tenure as prime minister also began with Le Pen mostly on his side, before she decided to vote against him despite securing key fiscal concessions.

Meanwhile, the French president is betting that Bairroux’s experience as a supporter of centrist French politics will allow him to build a coalition to pass the budget.

Bayrou’s first concern will be to form a cabinet with personalities acceptable to the majority of parliamentarians in order to push through the 2025 budget, a key point of his agenda.

“I am well aware of the difficulties we face,” Bayrou said on Friday night.

Bayrou’s appointment did not change the political scene much.

“It’s a non-event, both for equities and for the bond spread,” said David Kruk, head of trading at La Financiere de L’Echiquier in Paris. “No one wants to invest in France at the moment, except those who want to play the recovery game at the end of the year.”

In an unscheduled report hours after Bairou’s appointment, Moody’s downgraded its rating on the eurozone’s second-largest economy to Aa3 from Aa2, three notches below the maximum rating. France has already been downgraded to corresponding levels by Fitch and S&P. Moody’s said its view is that France’s public finances will “weaken significantly in the coming years”.

Center

Bayrou is a Catholic who describes himself as inspired by the ideas of European Christian democracy.

He was named high commissioner for planning – an unpaid post at a government think tank he has held until now – by Macron four years ago. Since 2014 he has also served as mayor of the city of Pau in the South of France.

Bayrou’s political path, in part, mirrors the playbook of Macron’s new prime minister, as he too bet early in his career on building a centrist force, borrowing elements from traditional right and left parties.

Bayrou, who says he speaks with Macron about three times a week on the phone, has advocated for the French to retire later, although he did not vote for Macron’s unpopular pension reform last year, saying it should have been more ambitious and transformative. .

Bayrou served as education minister for four years in the 1990s, partly under president Jacques Chirac. He rose to prominence during the 2002 presidential election when he advocated for more proportional voting and was caught on television slapping a child he had accused of putting his hands in his pockets (Bairou later said he had acted as a “good father” ).

He ran for president in three consecutive elections, beginning in 2002, when he came fourth in the first round of the election, with about 7% of the vote. Five years later, in 2007, his share rose to 19% of the vote, but fell to 9% in 2012.

That year, he said he would vote for Socialist candidate Francois Hollande in the second round to block conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, who was accused by centrists of fueling fears about immigration and insecurity. The two have had a strained relationship ever since.

During the 2017 election campaign, after comparing Macron to Sarkozy and calling him the candidate of the “world of big interests and money”, he rallied behind the French president and was appointed justice minister in his first government.

Bairou was replaced after a month. In February he was acquitted in the seven-year case of his party’s illegal employment of parliamentary aides, paving the way for his return to government.

He has long advocated proportional voting in the National Assembly to shift more power from Paris to the rest of the country. Bardella said after news of the appointment that he expected progress on the measure – one of his party’s longstanding demands.

Bayrou has not given up on his presidential ambitions. Asked about the next presidential election in 2023, when Macron will not be legally able to run for a third consecutive term, he said Luiz da Silva Lula was elected president at 77. Bayrou will be 76 years old in 2027.