"We have no more leniency": between Bayrou and the Socialist Party, the divorce is complete after the "conclave" on pensions

By RG

Published on June 29, 2025 at 3:36 p.m. , updated on June 29, 2025 at 3:37 p.m.

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Analysis: After the failure of the pension "conclave," the Socialist Party filed a motion of censure against the government. As discussions on the 2026 budget approach, the Prime Minister's continued presence appears increasingly fragile.

François Bayrou has managed to anger the Socialists. To the point that they filed a motion of censure against the government on Thursday . The reason goes back to last January, when the Prime Minister saved his position at Matignon by promising to organize a social conference on pensions and to present an agreement, even partial, from the social partners to Parliament.

Since then, the "conclave" between unions and employers' organizations has failed , despite an additional meeting and some points of agreement . The socialists are demanding to be able to debate all issues in Parliament, including the sensitive legal retirement age, raised to 64 by the latest reform in 2023. Before going back on his word , hadn't François Bayrou promised them in a letter a discussion "without totems or taboos" ?

But the Prime Minister doesn't see it that way. On Thursday, he did indeed commit to bringing the pension issue before Parliament, but in the autumn as part of the next Social Security budget. This is hardly enough to satisfy the Socialist Party (PS): "You have made commitments on this issue that have not been kept [...]. This forces us, Mr. Prime Minister, to table a motion of censure against your government," the leader of the Socialist deputies, Boris Vallaud, told him in the National Assembly.

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The divorce between the Socialist Party and François Bayrou is complete. Since the non-censorship agreement at the beginning of the year, resentment has been building up. Parliament must be notified, otherwise censure would be a "moral obligation," threatened the re-elected Socialist leader Olivier Faure at the end of March . "He promised a law to Parliament. If he perjures himself, we will censure," he declared again on June 15. Even former President François Hollande, opposed to censure so as "not to add instability to the immobility," said in "Le Parisien" on Saturday that he was in favor of sending "a warning shot to the government."

Is the Prime Minister living his last days at Matignon? The PS's motion of censure has little chance of success, as the left-wing groups are the only ones who want to vote for it. According to him, it aims to "show that they are in the opposition," François Bayrou judged this Sunday on the "Grand Jury RTL-Le Figaro-Public Sénat-M6" program. On Thursday, while presenting the results of the "conclave" on pensions, he had put his saviors from the beginning of the year back in their place: "I cannot imagine that the party of Jacques Delors and Michel Rocard could consider" that the compromises reached were "an object of censure." To explain their attitude, he had suggested that the socialists "needed to show a sign of opposition for internal reasons that I can understand."

The same observation was made by the Minister for Relations with Parliament, Patrick Mignola, for whom the motion of censure "closes a sequence" . With its Congress in Nancy, in mid-June, "the Socialist Party has just experienced an internal debate which was quite tough" and "to heal the wounds, it felt the need for a motion of censure on which both the lines of (Olivier) Faure and (Nicolas) Mayer-Rossignol can be found" , this close associate of Bayrou told "La Tribune Dimanche" .

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