what political future for the boss of MoDem?

Tried for complicity in the affair of the supposedly fictitious Modem assistants, François Bayrou was acquitted on Monday. After Éric Dupond-Moretti and Olivier Dussopt, it is a third support of the President who is cleared. Will he be able to weigh in again in the rest of the five-year term?

Monday February 5, François Bayrou was released with the “benefit of the doubt”. The judges were unable to demonstrate that he was aware that some parliamentary assistants in the European Parliament were in fact working for his party. The boss of MoDem is therefore cleared. For him, it is the end of a seven-year political and personal nightmare.

He resigned as soon as the judicial investigation opened in 2017, a few weeks after being appointed Minister of Justice. Like two other MoDem ministers, Sylvie Goulard, and especially Marielle de Sarnez, his closest collaborator, who died three years ago before any trial. This is why François Bayrou said on Monday “that there are people who died” of these accusations.

What ambitions for the party and for himself?

Its political ambitions are now to influence, to weigh once again on the course of the majority. From the next few hours, with the imminent appointment of the missing ministers. Until then, he is doubly unhappy with the appointment of Gabriel Attal and then with the composition of a government that is too right-wing. Worse still, too Sarkozy in his eyes.

François Bayrou asked Emmanuel Macron for three positions for the MoDem among the fifteen delegate ministers and secretaries of state who will finally complete the government. Some in the majority even entertain the hypothesis of his return to National Education, to replace Amélie Oudéa-Castéra. Delighted to see, after Éric Dupond-Moretti and Olivier Dussopt, a third of his supporters cleared by the courts in a few weeks, Emmanuel Macron could let himself be tempted.

Ready to serve, François Bayrou however recalled Monday evening, on France 2, that he had already held the position… 31 years ago. Perhaps he sees further. At 72 years old, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon, he is not burying the idea of ​​a fourth presidential candidacy in 2027, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Marine Le Pen hopes for the same outcome

As for the affair of the parliamentary assistants, can the acquittal of François Bayrou set a precedent? This is what Marine Le Pen hopes. She will be tried in the fall, like around twenty other RN officials, for “embezzlement of public funds”.

This is also a case of fake parliamentary assistants in the European Parliament. But the charges and the damage are much heavier, the RN is accused of having embezzled 30 times more money than the MoDem: 6.8 million euros, between 2010 and 2017. Sums such as Marine Le Pen will have probably more difficult to convince that it was not an organized financing system and that she was not aware of it. Especially since she was then, unlike François Bayrou, an MEP.