(Bloomberg) -- France’s Prime Minister Francois Bayrou will meet with far-right leader Marine Le Pen on Monday, kicking off an effort to form a government that can push a budget through a divided Parliament.
Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, the head of her National Rally party, will meet at 9 a.m. with Bayrou, a party spokesman said. They’re the first of the political groupings in Parliament to be consulted by Bayrou, named Friday by President Emmanuel Macron after the previous government of Michel Barnier fell in a no-confidence vote backed by Le Pen.
Bayrou’s choice to meet with Le Pen reflects her growing clout in the wake of snap elections in July that left Parliament divided into three groups, none of which have a majority. The effort to form a government and craft a budget took on added urgency, after Moody’s Ratings over the weekend cut France’s credit rating, citing its weak finances and political gridlock.
“It’s the least he can do,” Laurent Jacobelli, a spokesman for the National Rally and member of Parliament, said Sunday on France Info television. “There has to be an end to this making the National Rally invisible and showing contempt for our 11 million voters. Mr. Barnier practically acted as if we didn’t exist.”
A spokesperson for the prime minister’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Le Pen’s party voted in favor of a no-confidence motion from the left-wing New Popular Front coalition to oust Barnier after he pushed through a 2025 budget bill using a constitutional provision that allowed him to do so without a vote in Parliament. The far-right leader sought a slower pace of deficit reduction, while the left pushed for higher taxes and a reversal of Macron’s pension reforms, which raised the retirement age.
Le Pen has said she is willing to work with the next government so long as it takes a less aggressive approach to cutting the deficit. France can overcome a government collapse to deliver a budget in “a matter of weeks” — so long as the next prime minister is prepared to narrow the deficit more slowly, she said in an interview with Bloomberg this month.
Bayrou, who is supported by Macron’s centrist coalition, will be hoping to placate Le Pen while also winning backing from the center-left Socialist Party, which has shown signs of breaking from the further-left France Unbowed.
Socialist Party leaders will also meet with Bayrou early this week, Boris Vallaud, the head of the party in the National Assembly, said Sunday on BFM TV.
The left’s disagreements with Barnier went beyond the budget. The Socialists and the Green Party are both pushing the new prime minister to back off from the hard line on immigration taken by Barnier’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, while the center-right Republicans are pushing Bayrou to keep him in a new government.
Bayrou and Retailleau jointly held a press conference Saturday night in a crisis meeting over a deadly cyclone that hit the French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean.
“This will indeed be a real bone of contention with François Bayrou, if he too were to slip further and further to the right,” Olivier Faure, the head of the Socialist party, said Sunday on France 3 television.
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