In the end, as the old saying goes, was his departure worth a mass? On Monday September 9th, France's prime minister François Bayrou gave what was billed as a farewell speech before the National Assembly, but which sounded more like a sermon. He gave a short oration for the occasion – 40 minutes – that was clearly meant to leave its mark on history. And during it the soon-to-be former prime minister cast himself as the scapegoat of a political class obsessed with what he called a “mindset of bartering and division”.
As he had done for a fortnight across the media, the head of government told the chamber that he alone had rejected the “daily blunders”, the state spending that had “become an addiction” and the “tides of debt” engulfing the nation. “I believe in compromise, but as long as it respects what matters most: the order of priorities and urgent matters,” he repeated, without the slightest hint of self-criticism. His last speech began with the word “ordeal” and ended with “courage”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Unsurprisingly, this ode by the prime minister to his own courage did not convince many. At 7pm, the president of the National Assembly confirmed what everyone had known for days: for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, a government had fallen on a vote of confidence (as opposed to a vote of censure or no-confidence). Only 194 MPs cast their vote for François Bayrou, while 364 voted against.
“Under article 50, the prime minister must hand the government's resignation to the president of the Republic,” announced Assembly president Yaël Braun-Pivet, before closing the session. In a statement from the Elysée minutes later, Emmanuel Macron said he had “taken note” of the result and that he would name a successor “in the very next few days”.
Bayrou under fire
On the MPs’ benches, minds were already elsewhere: in this uncertain post-Bayrou world, the Socialist Party (PS) leader Olivier Faure was sketching the scene in his notebook; communist-allied MP Emmanuel Maurel was reading Robert Darnton’s book The Revolutionary Temper; while Macron supporters were busy tapping away on their phones. Sitting in the chamber's nearest balcony, the founder of the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI), Jean-Luc Mélenchon, had once more made the trip to watch this small moment of history, though one that has become almost routine in the past two years. The national secretary of the green party Les Écologistes, Marine Tondelier, was also sitting there, a few rows away.
As soon as Bayrou’s final words were spoken, the pair left, and Boris Vallaud, president of the Socialist group at the Assembly, mounted the podium to renew Olivier Faure’s party’s offer that it was willing to serve the president. “We are ready, let him [editor's note, Emmanuel Macron] come and fetch us!” Vallaud declared, with a nod to the affair involving the president's personal security advisor Alexandre Benalla, whose public disgrace after media revelations led Emmanuel Macron to dare his critics to come and get him.
“Your second-rate prophet act no longer amuses anyone,” said MP Mathilde Panot from the podium. The president of the LFI Parliamentary group blasted the “violence” of Emmanuel Macron’s policies and of his prime minister, whom she branded an “impostor” and a “danger to the country”, before looking ahead to the coming social unrest at the planned 'block the country' protest on September 10th. “The ruin you have brought is not only economic, it is also a moral one. […] You're right to be afraid. September 10th stands as a mighty call to action,” she declared.
Dissolution is not an option, but an obligation.
Members of the government coalition had once again appealed to the National Assembly’s sense of duty in the face of the country’s plight. Gabriel Attal, president of the Macronist group and of the president's Renaissance party, a former prime minister, and a minister for the past seven years, even dared lament a “politics sick with certainties, red lines, decrees”.
“Let's at last put ideas first, and find the courage for dialogue,” he urged, apparently unaware of the consequences of the president's eight years in power. In his group, only one MP failed to back the government: Violette Spillebout, co-rapporteur of the Parliamentary inquiry into the child abuse scandal at the Notre-Dame-de-Bétharram private Catholic school, who abstained.
Moments before, Laurent Wauquiez, leader of the rightwing Droite républicaine (DR) group of MPs, had said he would vote “without enthusiasm” for the government, while giving his group free rein to vote as they saw fit. Keen not to appear bound to the prime minister’s budget plan – which included removing two public holidays - he nonetheless denounced the “365 holidays of those who do not work and live off handouts” and hammered home his peculiar take on those political groups considered to be acceptable to the sensibilities of the Republic, the so-called 'Republican arc'.
“The far-left is the main political danger to the French Republic,” thundered the man who is calling for a union of the Right stretching as far as Sarah Knafo, an MP allied to far-right failed presidential candidate Éric Zemmour. In the end, 13 MPs from his group voted against, nine abstained. Only 27 MPs from the rightwing Les Républicains (LR) backed the government of which they are a part.
A departure without regrets
From the podium the prime minister – as he still then was - insisted that he was critical of the “easy answers” of those who believe it was “foreigners who are to blame for everything and that it's on them we waste our money”. In truth, Bayrou had fought to the end to stay in power by making pledges to the Right and far-right.
Just days before the vote, he had boasted of having launched a reform of the aide médicale d’État (AME) state health benefit which would have stripped tens of thousands of undocumented foreigners of all healthcare. This was a measure pushed by interior minister Bruno Retailleau, Éric Ciotti from the hard-right and the far-right's Marine Le Pen.
But that attempt to woo the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) failed. Marine Le Pen’s whole group voted against the prime minister, as did Éric Ciotti's allies. In her speech before the vote, Le Pen was already looking ahead, again urging Emmanuel Macron to dissolve the Assembly and call fresh parliamentary elections to break the deadlock.
“Dissolution is for him not an option but an obligation,” she argued. “The president may choose to reappoint a prime minister who will likely not get through the budget debates. That decision would signal the country’s slide into gridlock.” Two hours before the vote, RN MP Nicolas Meizonnet was already looking forward to fresh elections. “I have no problem going back on the campaign trail, I already have my posters and flyers,” said the MP for the southern département or county of the Gard.
Still chasing respectability, Marine Le Pen again stopped short of calling on the head of state to quit. From the podium, the three-time presidential candidate instead invoked the “high regard I have for our institutions”. Yet only months ago she had attacked judges after being sentenced to two years in jail and being given a five-year immediate ban from office for misuse of European parliamentary assistants’ funds.
By coincidence, only hours before the confidence vote, the RN leader learnt that her appeal trial on that case would take place from January 13th to February 12th 2026 – right in the middle of campaigning for the March 2026 municipal elections, as the far-right party’s leadership had feared. “The system’s luck runs deep,” sneered RN spokesman Laurent Jacobelli at the chamber entrance when the news broke, hinting at a supposed plot over the appeal hearing timing. “It’s all a stitch up, the trick's a bit too obvious,” he said.
I'm glad we could share this moment.
A desire to move on hung heavily over Monday’s session. During his speech, the prime minister found few backers even among his own side, who gave him a tame standing ovation tinged with relief. On the Left, his fall brought “neither regret nor sadness”, said green group leader Cyrielle Chatelain, while former Socialist Emmanuel Maurel was “most disappointed”. He said with a smile: “I expected more from a classics graduate. His best speech was his farewell one.”
Former Macron supporter Sacha Houlié, too, found nothing to salvage from what he called a fiasco of a term of office. “Bayrou continued the Right’s tax policy and its agenda on sovereign issues, from youth justice law to the Duplomb law [editor's note, which sought to bring back a type of pesticide],” he said.
Nor was rightwing Les Républicains MP Philippe Gosselin wistful. “I still don't understand how someone who had long dreamt of [being prime minister] ended up here. He took us for fools for months and now drags us all down,” he said. “Today, he leaves through history’s back door.”
In his last words in the chamber, François Bayrou, who seemed to have sat through through a different session from everyone else, simply paid tribute to his short-lived government. “A team with many heavyweights, much togetherness and friendship, and not a single row,” he said. And before thanking the Assembly that was about to bring down his government, he said: “I'm glad we could share this moment.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter