Days before the likely fall of François Bayrou’s government, which faces a vote of confidence on September 8th, it is hard to resist the temptation to highlight the political dead end into which the centrist prime minister has steered himself. Having failed to maintain the pact with the Socialist Party (PS) that had allowed the 2025 budget to be passed, the prime minister is now unable to get a finance bill passed in a vote at the National Assembly for the second year in a row.
Beyond the issue of the budget, the nearly nine months of the Bayrou administration have been marked by a host of retreats and failures, chief among them a so-called “conclave” of various social partners that was meant to resolve the issue of the recent unpopular pension reform. Yet to sum up the prime minister's record as mere bluster would be unfair. The Bayrou government does have a track record and a political hue, it has passed laws and, for the most part, it has seen those laws enacted.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The way this government has operated over its short life so far, which has been characterised by the freedom accorded to its members, has often led to a cacophony of political noise. It has also left individual ministers free to launch verbal assaults at their own pet targets.
At the head of the pack in this regard have been Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister, and justice minister Gérald Darmanin. All this political freelancing has taken place with the backing and connivance of François Bayrou, who has often yielded to the rightwing Les Républicains (LR) – of whom Bruno Retailleau is a leading member - to shore up his support. This has come at the cost of a real impact on human rights, public services and state policies, as outlined below in this assessment of the government's record.
A final onslaught on social dialogue
It ended up as a trick, a resounding failure and a fresh weakening of the country' civil groups and social partners. On January 14th, François Bayrou dodged being defeated by a vote of no-confidence by pledging to put back on the table the deeply controversial 2023 pension reform, which increases the legal retirement age from 62 to 64. But on June 23rd, this so-called “conclave” or series of meetings on pensions ended without any deal being struck between unions and employers. And this was after four months of talks, a late postponement of discussions and a last-gasp press conference by the prime minister.
The whole affair was doomed from the start, however, as François Bayrou had ruled out any changes that would alter the revenue-raising balance of the reform, and also then flatly refused a return to a retirement age of 62. This cast doubt on his passionate declarations in support of social democracy, which is supposed to be a pillar of his politics, a guiding light for his actions.
Even the small points of agreement between the sides - an improvement in how women’s pensions are calculated and a small improvement in the age for ending the penalty for early retirement, which might have inched down from 67 to 66.5 – will not be adopted. This is because they were due to be part of the 2026 budget, which will not be passed under this government.
Indeed, this government's doomed budget barely had time to spark a strike call on September 18th, which was backed by all the unions. United in attacking what they see as a “chamber of horrors”, the unions are just as worried by the government’s plan to cut unemployment rights for the fifth time in six years as they are about pensions.
Failure and dithering over the climate
It was more than a missed opportunity, it was a complete failure. François Bayrou’s time as prime minister has proved a disaster for the green cause. The failures include the repeated retreats on implementing polices to shield nature from land grab (backtracking on “zero net land take”) and to protect human health (low emission zones have been binned), the abandonment of those in energy poverty (a cut in the home improvement fund MaPrimeRénov’ and no clear response to the summer's heatwaves), while the green budget itself has been cut by two billion euros.
In this list of failures, two issues stand out in particular.
One is the re-authorisation of acetamiprid, a banned pesticide of the neonicotinoid family, which the loi Duplomb sought to bring back. This was only avoided thanks to the new law being censured by a ruling from the country's Constitutional Council, basing its reasoning on the Charter for the Environment. Only after this ruling did François Bayrou at last voice his “regret” that “throughout the lawmaking process, priority was not given to a medical and scientific study”. And this was despite the fact that the many scientific studies on the issue all point the same way: that the pesticide that MPs wanted to bring back is toxic and must no longer be used.
The second is that at no point did the prime minister, who is keen on using private jets to attend meetings of the city council at Pau in south-west France where he is also mayor, stress the need to slash our greenhouse gas emissions. This was despite the fact that France has just lived through its third hottest summer ever recorded. On August 7th, the day after the mega-fire in the Corbières area of southern France that devoured 17,000 hectares of greenery and killed a woman, François Bayrou merely muttered before the cameras: “The long period of global warming we are currently experiencing means we must change the way we live.”
This dithering over the climate is shown in France's deviation from the path of cutting carbon emissions, which had gone down 6.8% in 2023, then 1.8% in 2024. Though France must cut its release of carbon by 5% each year to do its share in the world fight against climate change, our emissions have stopped falling since the first quarter, and are set to flatline in 2025.
The language of the far-right
Barely a month after taking office, François Bayrou made a point of highlighting the “feeling of being flooded”, something that was in his view caused by immigration. The phrase, dear to the far-right Rassemblement national (RN), bolstered the hard-right Bruno Retailleau, whom the prime minister kept on as interior minister. This same Bruno Retailleau, whose portfolio includes responsibility for the nation's religions, then caused a stir by declaring “Down with the veil!”. Proclaiming it like an anthem, this became the watchword of his crusade to ban from sport any French woman daring to wear the hijab. François Bayrou himself joined the fray, going against the views of expert reports on the subject.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Trapped in the car crash of his “flooded” comments, the prime minister could not resist returning to the subject at the National Assembly, first arguing that “prejudices are fed by reality”, before, staggeringly, recounting a tale that revived an old racial stereotype. Addressing MPs, the prime minister spoke of how a former “African” schoolmate, the only non-white pupil among many whites, had provoked the “jealousy” of other boys – and his own – because he attracted the attention of a young woman who Bayrou liked.
Violence against children: a culpable lack of action
This kind of debt is not counted in billions of euros, but in broken lives. This is the debt that the state owes those children hurt in educational institutions such as the scandal-hit Bétharram private Catholic school in south-west France or in their homes, and whom the public authorities were unable to detect, count, assist or help recover, all because of a lack of state policies that were fit for purpose. This is a debt that François Bayrou, who now poses as a “good father” eager to do his best, never meant to tackle. In the end, his lack of action effectively allowed such abuse to thrive.
Yet the very least one can say is that he personally had every opportunity to act. Less than two months after Bayrou became prime minster, Mediapart revealed that he had been told, as far back as the 1990s, of a number of acts of violence within the Bétharram school. At the time, this staunch Catholic wanted nothing to do with these warnings.
Once prime minister, he spent months trying to impose his untruths and deny his responsibilities on the issue, never rising high enough above the fray to be able to set out a wide-ranging plan to fight the ongoing violence inflicted on children. The figures show that 160,000 minors are subject to sexual violence each year in France. Even his idea of a “council of survivors”, drawn from the German model, the only one he sketched out during his hearing before the National Assembly committee of inquiry into the abuse of children, has not been implemented.
Health gets the austerity treatment
So far in 2025 there have been several cases of extreme violence hitting schools. The parents of Lorène, stabbed to death by a classmate in April in Nantes in western France, spoke on France Inter radio on September 2nd to “remind politicians that the issue of mental health is a priority”. They should already have known this: the issue was designated as the great national cause for 2025.
But what should have been a key political initiative has in the end produced next to nothing. There was a vague plan with no resources, rushed out by the very low-profile health minister Yannick Neuder. Meanwhile, psychiatric services have been cut to the bone, like the rest of the health system: the budget outlined for 2026 is of an historic harshness, the 2025 deficit was 23 billion euros, while some hospitals are so deep in debt there is a risk of them not being able to pay their bills.
The Bayrou government can be credited with one tiny measure: doctors in over-staffed areas must now spend two to three days each month in areas where there is a shortage of practitioners, in so-called 'medical deserts'. But this does still not meet the huge gaps in access to care across the country, which the prime minister himself has described as a “scandal for public health” and for “republican fairness”.
Fight against poverty dodged
It took the prime minister seven months to recall the existence of anti-poverty groups. François Bayrou finally met them at Matignon, his official residence, in early July. According to those present, he sought to highlight his track record of concern over social issues and stressed how much he cared for the voluntary sector. Yet his record in this field scarcely justifies such talk. His only concrete measure has been a pledge to keep the current 203,000 emergency accommodation places, a figure already unable to meet all the country's demands.
The government’s inaction in this area is very clear, apart from the insufficient Pacte des solidarités anti-poverty measure brought in by Élisabeth Borne when she was prime minister in 2023. Once in charge himself, François Bayrou introduced no major measure to help the poorest in society.
Yet the stark figures show the depth of the crisis. Around 600,000 people have slipped into poverty, says the state statistical agency INSEE, something not seen for 30 years. Welfare benefits have not been uprated. And the plan to freeze benefit payments at their current levels for 2026 will not help. As for the 2,159 children living on the street this year, 503 of them aged under three, no answer has ever been found for them. Some 38 child deaths have been recorded, to widespread indifference.
Justice system: hard right ahead!
On the justice system, the Bayrou government has mainly made pledges to butter up those voters who favour tougher policies on law and order. Moving from his role as interior minister or 'top cop' to become justice minister last December, Gérald Darmanin quickly sought to show real action when it came to prisons, though this turned out to be all smoke and mirrors.
His main steps, meant to deal with the dire state of French prisons, have been the creation of two ultra-secure jails for drug barons, something straight out of the grim high security wings of the 1970s, and low-cost “modular” prisons to hold prisoners on very short sentences.
Courting the unions, Gérald Darmanin has been particularly open to Unité Magistrats-FO, a small union and the most repressive in terms of penal policy in the justice arena, and which campaigns for short jail terms to be served behind bars and no longer suspended. In fact, several of this group’s ideas appear in the draft law dubbed 'SURE' – aimed at “fast, useful and effective punishments” - tabled by the justice minister in July.
As early as May, in a letter to all magistrates, the minister boasted of launching a raft of steps meant to “bring back common sense, real actions and speed” to the justice system. This was a mixed bag of pledges, among them using “online hearings” and “scrapping paper letters”, for instance, and the return of the calamitous “minimum sentences”. On the other hand, there was no plan to fight corruption more effectively nor to give more independence to state prosecutors.
Gérald Darmanin's law-and-order leanings and his hint of populism were also evident in his bid to toughen the youth justice system, when he himself took up former prime minister Gabriel Attal’s highly-controversial bill on the issue. This included instant trials, the end of “reduced responsibility” and longer periods of remand for minors.
Thankfully, the country's Constitutional Council put an end to these plans by striking down the law's main measures in June. As it did so, the court noted that children have rights and that educational measures must outweigh the repressive, as stipulated in the 1945 decree on minors.
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- The original French version of this analysis can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter