French PM to testify under oath on snowballing child abuse scandal

PARIS — French Prime Minister François Bayrou faces a perilous moment in his premiership this week as he is expected to testify in a child abuse scandal that has dragged his polling numbers into the gutter.

Bayrou will be grilled by lawmakers on Wednesday as part of a parliamentary inquiry, where MPs will seek to clarify just how much he knew about reports of abuse at a private Catholic school near his hometown when they first began surfacing in the 1990s.

Bayrou has repeatedly said he did not know the extent of the abuse at the time.

The case came back into the public eye last year when prosecutors announced they would investigate fresh allegations from dozens of former pupils at Notre-Dame de Bétharram, which some of Bayrou’s own children attended, obtained by a former student who authored a book on the scandal.

The scandal then ensnared the prime minister in February when French investigative outlet Mediapart published witness statements and documents that purported to show that Bayrou “could not have been unaware of the accusations.” Bayrou was education minister from 1993 to 1997 and held multiple local executive mandates in the area.

Bayrou continued to deny the allegations and even threatened to sue Mediapart, but his defense took a serious hit after testimony from an investigator and a judge involved in the case that Bayrou had been made aware of the details of the allegations.

The drama took an even more shocking turn last month when Bayrou’s own daughter revealed she had been abused in 1987 by a priest working at a sister school, though the Bétharram congregation has since denied the priest was part of their community. She said she only told her father about the incident moments before the news became public.

Emmanuel Macron, who holds exclusive powers when it comes to calling a referendum, is expected to weigh in on the subject in a scheduled TV interview on Tuesday. | Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA

Polls show the Bétharram scandal has seriously affected Bayrou’s standing among a general public already angry with the intractable nature of French politics following President Emmanuel Macron’s ill-advised snap elections last year.

Opinion polls show that Bayrou’s popularity took a nosedive in the weeks following the February reports. A survey by respected pollster IFOP found just 25 percent of respondents in April said they were satisfied with his leadership, while another poll found his support clocked in at an even more paltry 15 percent.

Serious doubts

“People were shocked by the affair,” said Frédéric Dabi, director general at IFOP. Dabi said the public appeared to have serious doubts about Bayrou’s version of events and questioned whether the prime minister was trying to protect powerful people around him at the time.

Wednesday’s hearing will likely prove pivotal for Bayrou, especially with a looming budget crisis and an incensed far right nipping at his heels after Marine Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement and barred from running for president.

The opposition, it appears, is out for blood.

“Not only did he lie, but he repeated his lies in front of members of the parliament and in front of the Bétharram victims,” said far-left opposition lawmaker Paul Vannier, who is co-rapporteur of the parliamentary inquiry and will be grilling Bayrou on Wednesday, referring to Bayrou’s denials.

While Bayrou has been able to survive France’s gridlocked politics longer than his predecessor Michel Barnier, his minority center-right government is hanging by a thread and surviving thanks only to a fractured opposition, which could coalesce against it in the upcoming budget cycle.

Bayrou is seeking €40 billion in savings — mostly through spending cuts — in France’s 2026 budget as part of his effort to bring down an unsustainable deficit, but he’s been criticized for failing to come up with a serious approach. His latest proposal to put the budget to a referendum raised eyebrows in his own coalition and among Macron’s inner circle.

“We have a prime minister who kicks the can down the road, who only tries to buy time and doesn’t make decisions,” said center-right heavyweight Laurent Wauquiez from the conservative Les Républicains.

Macron, who holds exclusive powers when it comes to calling a referendum, is expected to weigh in on the subject in a scheduled TV interview on Tuesday, adding more tension to an already treacherous week for Bayrou.

Sarah Paillou contributed to this report.