Do we like them?

Do we like François Bayrou?

Our score: 5 out of 10. Complicated and thin: real stains and an undecided court case, with little verified good to set against them.

Bayrou is a veteran of French centrist politics: leader of the MoDem party, a former prime minister, and for years the mayor of Pau. His fall has been steady. He left Matignon, the prime minister's residence, in 2025, and in March 2026 he lost his home town to a Socialist rival by 344 votes.

The court case is the big live one. Bayrou was acquitted at first instance over MoDem's European Parliament assistants. On 28 September 2026, two prosecutors told the appeal court he could not have been unaware of what they called a system of misusing public funds, and asked for two years suspended, a €50,000 fine and three years of suspended ineligibility. He has again rejected any responsibility, and until the court rules he is presumed innocent.

Then there's Bétharram, a Catholic boarding school near Pau at the centre of abuse allegations. Bayrou was education minister in the 1990s, and he has been accused of knowing and not acting. A National Assembly inquiry reported in July 2025 that it found no conclusive proof of whether he intervened in one case. It did cite a lack of action by him. One rapporteur, Paul Vannier, alone endorsed a line saying Bayrou had previously lied to parliament, while his co-rapporteur did not sign on to it. Bayrou has denied covering anything up.

On the harm check, the main mark is his January 2025 migration remark. As prime minister he defended talk of migratory “submersion”, calling it “the most appropriate word” for Mayotte. A Socialist leader asked whether he had knowingly adopted far-right language, and a Green leader accused him of fuelling conspiracy theories. He said he needed no lessons in fraternity. Where you land depends on whether you read it as blunt talk about integration or as borrowed far-right vocabulary. I found nothing from him on trans rights or climate in what I read, so that is a gap, not a clean bill.

The recent story is a political decline, not a scandal. Losing Pau was reported as a fresh setback six months after leaving Matignon. The appeal verdict is the next chapter. A defeat there would be a heavy blow, and an acquittal would leave the Bétharram questions standing.

The good stuff is the thin part of this card. Twelve years running a city and a long public career count for something, but I found no verified charity record or personal acts of kindness in the pages I could open, and I won't invent them.