François Bayrou

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François Bayrou (2017)

François Bayrou ([ fʀɑ̃.swa · baj.ʀu ]; born May 25, 1951 in Bordères near Pau , Département Pyrénées-Atlantiques ) is a French politician, since 2007 chairman of the party "Democratic Movement" ( Mouvement démocrate or MoDem for short) and Mayor of Pau (Département Pyrénées-Atlantiques) since April 2014. He ran in the French presidential elections in 2002 (6.8%), 2007 (18.6%) and 2012 (9.1%). In 2017 he formed a successful alliance with Emmanuel Macron's En Marche to elect Macron. He is chairman of the European Democratic Party . From 1993 to 1997 he was French Minister of Education. In the transitional cabinet Philippe I (May to June 2017) he was Deputy Prime Minister ( Ministre d'État , “Minister of State”) and Minister of Justice .

Life

The son of a small farmer first studied Classical Literature at the University of Bordeaux and graduated at the age of 23 with the Agrégation (admission to higher teaching post) in Classical Literature. Bayrou's father was already a politician, even if only at the local level: He was mayor of his home village Bordères and a member of the Christian Democratic People's Republican Movement (MRP).

Bayrou's great interest in literature and history is expressed, among other things, in the publication of books on the history of France , including a biography of the "good king" Henry IV , whom he sees as a model for today's France, as he has peace and reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants. He has also published numerous political works (see below).

Bayrou is married and has six children.

Early political career

Bayrou began his political career in the Christian Democratic Center des démocrates sociaux (CDS; successor party to the MRP). This was part of the bourgeois-liberal party alliance Union pour la démocratie française (UDF), which supported the presidency of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing . Bayrou is characterized by a Christian-democratic attitude and describes himself as a practicing Catholic and adherent of secularism .

Bayrou is - untypical for a French top politician - not a graduate of an elite university, but went on a party-political " ox tour ": From 1979 to 1981 he was a senior administrative officer in the Ministry of Agriculture, which was headed by his party colleague Pierre Méhaignerie , after which he was President of the Senate Alain Poher (also UDF-CDS). In 1982 he was elected to the General Council of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques Department in the extreme southwest of France for the UDF . He kept his seat on the General Council until 2008.

From 1984 to 1986 he advised the then President of the European Parliament Pierre Pflimlin (UDF-CDS). In 1986 he was elected to the National Assembly, but lost his seat again in the early elections in 1988. From 1986 to 1993 Bayrou was the "Standing Group in the Fight against Illiteracy". Bayrou rejected the fact that the actually very pro-European UDF put together a list for the 1989 European elections with the Gaullist and rather Eurosceptic RPR . Instead, he supported the list of UDF dissenters (mainly from the CDS) formed Le Center pour l'Europe with the top candidate Simone Veil , whose election campaign he also managed. Despite these differences, Giscard d'Estaing appointed him Secretary General of the UDF in 1991. From 1992 to 2001, Bayrou was President of the General Council in his home department, Pyrénées-Atlantiques.

Minister of Education

After the electoral victory of the right-wing liberals under Édouard Balladur , Bayrou was appointed Minister for National Education in his cabinet on March 29, 1993 . During his tenure, he carried out a comprehensive review of the situation of students and teachers in France.

Bayrou also played an important role in the French headscarf dispute . In a ministerial circular in September 1994, he restricted the 1989 regulation that permitted school children to wear religious symbols (including the Islamic headscarf ). The circular made a distinction between "discrete" symbols that were allowed in school and "ostentatious" symbols (which included the headscarf) that were not allowed. In response, there were student protests. Bayrou used Hanifa Cherifi, herself a Muslim immigrant from Algeria, as a mediator. This tried to dissuade the girls from wearing the headscarf or at least to convince them of bandanas , which exposed the earlobes and hairline and were therefore permitted. Nevertheless, on the basis of the Bayrou circular, around 100 female students were excluded from classes in the following ten years. The Conseil d'État, as the highest administrative court, lifted the exclusion from teaching in almost all cases. Overall, however, the number of female students wearing headscarves fell sharply.

When Alain Juppé became the new prime minister in 1995 , he left Bayrou in his ministerial office and expanded his portfolio to include research.

CDS and UDF chairman

In December 1994 Bayrou was elected party leader of the CDS. Bayrou's endeavor was to create a force in the political center that should be strong enough to face the Gaullists on the right on an equal footing. To this end, he wanted to merge the various parties united in the UDF into a single party. Initially, however, only his CDS and the small social democratic PSD took part in this project . The merged party adopted the name Force démocrate (Democratic Force) and Bayrou became its chairman. The other parties of the UDF remained independent components of the party alliance. When the center-right Juppé cabinet lost its parliamentary majority in 1997 and a left-wing government came into office again, Bayrou lost his ministerial post.

In 1998 the UDF split over the question of whether politicians from the bourgeois alliance could also be elected regional presidents with votes from the right-wing extremist Front National . The right-wing liberal Démocratie Libérale (DL) advocated this, Bayrou and the other UDF constituents strictly opposed it. The DL then left the UDF. Bayrou took this opportunity to convert the elements that remained in the UDF into a single party, under the name Nouvelle UDF . He became their party leader and remained so until their dissolution in 2007. In the 1999 European Parliament election , he was the top candidate on the UDF list. The list received 9.3 percent of the vote and Bayrou became a member of the European Parliament . In the European People's Party - the EU-wide association of Christian Democratic parties - Bayrou advocated a decidedly pro-European course oriented towards the political center. When the ÖVP in Austria formed a coalition with the right-wing extremist FPÖ in 2000, Bayrou initiated the Schuman Group (named after Robert Schuman ) to defend traditional Christian democratic values.

François Bayrou (2006)

In 2002 he took part in the French presidential election and came fourth with 6.8 percent of the votes in the first ballot. In the same year the liberal center split when part of it opened up to the plan of a strong center-right party under Jacques Chirac , which was carried out in the form of the UMP . Bayrou tried in vain to maintain the UDF's independence.

Bayrou gave up his mandate as a MEP after the election to the National Assembly in 2002 to become a member of the National Assembly. In the regional elections in Aquitaine in 2004 he suffered a bitter defeat against the UMP candidate. In the 2004 European elections , the UDF received 12% of the vote. After this election, the UDF MPs left the Christian Democratic-Conservative EPP-ED Group . Instead, Bayrou, together with Francesco Rutelli from the Italian Margherita Party , initiated the European Democratic Party (EDP) as an amalgamation of pro-European center parties. They complained that by accepting more conservative parties, the EPP had opened up too far to the right and moved away from European federalism . In the European Parliament, the EDP formed a group with the Liberals, the ALDE . Bayrou and Rutelli have been co-chairs of the EDP ever since.

2007 presidential candidacy and MoDem

François Bayrou at a Linux fair in La Défense (2007)

In the election campaign for the 2007 French presidential election , according to surveys by the major polling institutes, Bayrou managed to develop from a hopeless niche candidate to a serious contender for the presidency within a few weeks . His candidacy was supported by smaller parties such as Corinne Lpage's eco-liberal group Cap 21 and the Mouvement écologiste indépendant .

He presented himself as a middle-class candidate and an alternative to his socialist rival Ségolène Royal and the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy . With a share of the vote of 18.57 percent, Bayrou achieved the third-best result and did not make it into the runoff election. Still, this was the best result for a UDF candidate since Giscard d'Estaing in 1981. Bayrou did particularly well in his home region in the southwest (in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department he came in first place) and among young voters.

In the context of his candidacy, he described the European Union as "the most beautiful structure of all humanity". On general European issues, he spoke out against Turkey's accession to the EU and in favor of the European draft constitution . He rejected a reference to God in the text on the grounds that religion and law should not be mixed up.

In the second ballot, Bayrou gave his supporters no election recommendation, but stated that he would not personally vote for Sarkozy. In doing so, he broke with the tradition of the UDF to always support the center-right candidate in the runoff election at the latest.

After the 2007 presidential election , Bayrou announced the founding of the new Mouvement démocrate (MoDem) party and became its first chairman. MoDem should position itself exactly in the middle of the political spectrum and, unlike the UDF before it, should not make any electoral alliances with the conservatives. Many UDF MPs did not take this step, partly because they feared for their parliamentary seats, which they had only won thanks to these electoral alliances. The UDF MPs, who wanted to continue working with the conservative UMP, founded the Nouveau Center (NC) instead . MoDem was the third strongest force in the first round of the National Assembly election on June 10, with 7.6% of the vote. The result, however, lagged far behind the Bayrous in the presidential election: only 30 percent of the Bayrou voters on April 22 voted for MoDem. Because of the majority vote, which Bayrou criticized as very unfair, only he and three other MPs entered the National Assembly . The Nouveau Center, which had joined the Majorité Présidentielle , received only 2% of the vote, but thanks to the agreements with the UMP 22 MPs and was thus able to form a parliamentary group. Bayrou accepted this low strength of the MoDem in the National Assembly for the independence of the party.

Since 2012

François Bayrou (2012)

Bayrou ran again in the 2012 presidential election , but received only half as many votes as in 2007 and finished fifth with 9.13%. François Hollande (PS) became President. In the parliamentary elections on June 10 and 17, 2012 , Bayrou also lost his own parliamentary seat because of his deliberate renunciation of agreements with socialists or conservatives, as he lost votes compared to 2007 and only achieved second place in his constituency. His public announcement after the first round of the presidential election that he would vote for François Hollande probably contributed to the loss of his parliamentary mandate as the Conservatives ran a candidate against Bayrou. In response to the result, Bayrou announced that he would initially withdraw from public life, but would continue to be politically active, albeit in a different form than before. The only remaining members of the Mouvement démocrate as representatives in the National Assembly were Jean Lassalle and the newly elected Thierry Robert .

Bayrou concentrated his political activity in the following period on his home region. In 2014 he was elected mayor of Pau , the largest city in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department.

On February 22, 2017, after several months of speculation about his fourth candidacy in the 2017 presidential election , Bayrou offered the promising presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron an alliance “to enable France to make a real change”.

Macron was elected President on May 7, 2017 . He appointed shortly afterwards Édouard Philippe the Prime Minister and commissioned him a Cabinet to be formed. This was appointed on May 17, 2017; Bayrou was Deputy Prime Minister ( Ministre d'État , "Minister of State") and Minister of Justice . On June 21, 2017, Bayrou announced that he would no longer belong to the Philippe II cabinet, which was to be newly formed after the parliamentary elections, due to a bogus employment affair . His party colleagues Sylvie Goulard (Defense Minister) and Marielle de Sarnez (European Minister) resigned for the same reason.

Role in Houellebecq's novel "Submission"

In Michel Houellebecq's 2015 novel “ Submission ”, Bayrou plays an important role in the fictional takeover of power by the Muslim Brotherhood in France in 2022. Bayrous’s participation is described by a fictional ex-employee of the French domestic secret service as a “brilliant” move by the fictional Muslim party leader and the new president of France, as the politician is particularly suitable for his plans because of his character: “He had [...] entered into a deal with Mohammed Ben Abbes: He had undertaken to appoint Bayrou prime minister if he was the winner emerged from the presidential elections. […] What makes Bayrou so unique, so irreplaceable […] is its stupidity. His political blueprint has always remained limited to his personal wish to hold a “high office” under all circumstances […] He never had ideas of his own, nor did he pretend to have any; this is very rare. This makes him the ideal politician who embodies the concept of humanism , especially since he considers himself Henry IV and a great peacemaker in the dialogue of religions. In addition, he is very popular with the Catholic electorate, who soothe his stupidity. That is exactly what Ben Abbes needs [...] "

Fonts

  • Le roi libre. - Paris: Flammarion, 1994 - ISBN 2080668218
    Le roi libre. - Paris: France loisirs, 1995 - ISBN 2724289447
    Le roi libre. - Paris: Éd. J'ai lu, 1996 - ISBN 2277241830
    Henri IV. - Paris: Perrin jeunesse, 1998 - ISBN 2262013012
    Henri IV: le roi libre. - Paris: Flammarion, 1999 - ISBN 208067725X .
  • Saint-Louis. - Paris: Flammarion, 1997 - ISBN 2080672088 .
  • Ils portaient l'écharpe blanche: l'aventure des premiers réformés, des Guerres de religion à l'édit de Nantes, de la Révocation à la Révolution. - Paris: B. Grasset, 1998 - ISBN 2246559812
    Ils portaient l'écharpe blanche: l'aventure des premiers réformés, des Guerres de religion à l'édit de Nantes, de la Révocation à la Révolution. - Paris: Librairie générale française, 2000 - ISBN 225314779-6 .
Political publications

literature

  • François Bayrou , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 09/2014 from February 25, 2014, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  • Daniela Kallinich: François Bayrou - a town hall for a kingdom. In: Democracy in turmoil. Yearbook of the Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research 2015. Ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2016, pp. 369–373.

Web links

Commons : François Bayrou  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Bernard Pascuito, Olivier Biscaye: Les politiques ont aussi une mère. Albin Michel, Paris 2017.
  2. ↑ a b Alexis Brézet, Philippe Goulliaud, Guillaume Tabard: François Bayrou: "Je veux rassurer et apaiser les tensions" ( Memento of the original of March 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Le Figaro from March 28, 2007 (French) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lefigaro.fr
  3. ^ A b Daniela Kallinich: François Bayrou - a town hall for a kingdom. 2016, p. 371.
  4. ↑ Anna C. Korteweg, Gökçe Yurdakul: Headscarf Debates in Europe. Conflicts about belonging in national narratives. Transcript, Bielefeld 2016, p. 47.
  5. ↑ Frank Schenker: Contested Laïcité. A policy analysis on the banning of conspicuous religious signs in French public schools. In: Felix Heidenreich u. a .: State and religion in France and Germany. Lit Verlag 2008, pp. 176-198, at p. 178.
  6. ^ Udo Kempf: The political system of France. 5th edition, Springer V, Wiesbaden 2016, p. 213.
  7. ^ Karl Magnus Johansson: European People's Party. In: European Political Parties between Cooperation and Integration. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2002, pp. 51–80, on p. 66.
  8. ^ David Hanley: Beyond the Nation State. Parties in the Era of European Integration. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (Hampshire) 2008, p. 121.
  9. ↑ welt.de April 9, 2007: Bayrou, the candidate without memory
  10. ↑ Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Richard Nadeau, Éric Bélanger: French Presidential Elections. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (Hampshire) / New York, p. 18.
  11. ^ Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2007
  12. ^ Udo Kempf: The political system of France. 5th edition, Springer V, Wiesbaden 2016, p. 241.
  13. ^ Daniela Kallinich: François Bayrou - a town hall for a kingdom. 2016, p. 371.
  14. ↑ François Bayrou: J'ai décidé de proposer à Emmanuel #Macron une alliance pour offrir à la France une vraie alternance. # Présidentielle2017 #ConfBayrou. In: @bayrou. February 22, 2017. Retrieved June 18, 2017 .
  15. ↑ spiegel.de June 21, 2017: Justice Minister François Bayrou resigns .
  16. ↑ FAZ.net: Macron's ally in dire need
  17. ↑ Michel Houellebecq: Submission (novel). DuMont Buchverlag , 2017 (7th edition), ISBN 978-3832163594 .
personal data
SURNAME Bayrou, François
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Bordères