Before consulting parties and parliamentary groups, François Bayrou sees himself as a “builder” or a “repairer”

Le nouveau Premier ministre François Bayrou AFP POOL – STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/POOL

Le Premier ministre va recevoir tous les groupes parlementaires et responsables de parti, lundiet mardi. Première invitée : Marine Le Pen.

The new Prime Minister François Bayrou will meet face to face with the presidents of the parliamentary groups on Monday 16 and Tuesday 17 December, as he continues his consultations to form a government.

The leader of the National Rally (RN) deputies, Marine Le Pen, who will be accompanied by Jordan Bardella, the party's president, will be the first to be received at Matignon, La Tribune reported on Sunday this weekend.

The parliamentary groups and party leaders will thus be received “in order of importance” numerically at the National Assembly, her entourage announced to Agence France Presse.

End of consultations Tuesday

These consultations should be completed on Tuesday, so that François Bayrou can begin forming his government.
Bruno Retailleau remains in government?

The Béarnais, successor to Michel Barnier, told the weekly that he intended to unite and repair a divided France, with three major blocs in the National Assembly: “My primary vocation is to be a builder and, failing that, a repairer. I love nothing more in life than to revive buildings, machines that everyone considered lost. I like to repair.”

Bertrand, Darmanin, Borne, Rebsamen…

“We must invent an authority that the French understand, in which they recognize themselves and where they know that they will have their place”, he also argued. A way of suggesting that heavyweights could join this government, those who were cruelly lacking in the team of his predecessor.

The names of Xavier Bertrand, Gérald Darmanin, Élisabeth Borne and François Rebsamen were circulating on Sunday, while it seemed certain that Bruno Retailleau would keep his post at the Ministry of the Interior.

“The Himalayas that stand before us”

On Friday, on the occasion of the transfer of power, François Bayrou had already suggested that his priorities would be the “reconciliation” of a fractured society and the resolution “without timidity” of the problem of debt and public deficits that grips the country, ensuring that we do not “know nothing about the Himalayas that stand before us”.

With two mandatory steps to take: avoiding censorship in Parliament and getting the 2025 budget adopted.

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