France’s former prime minister, François Bayrou, freshly ejected from parliament, insists he will keep “no advantages” relating to his lost position.
Technically true but it is not quite the whole story. France’s ever-growing “ex-pm club” costs millions to the French taxpayers.
Bayrou will not pocket the €48,000 end-of-service allowance that other ex-ministers enjoy, as mentioned in the 2003 Organic Law on transparency in public life, because his job as mayor of Pau pays him €8,200 a month.
He will not get a chauffeur or a secretary either, since at 74 he’s too old for the perk and already uses a taxpayer-funded Peugeot 5008 courtesy of his mayoral office.
Yet Bayrou will still cost the nation. Like every other former tenant of a pm’s official residency, the Matignon, he is guaranteed permanent police security, with salaries, vehicles and expenses covered by the interior ministry.
And that police escort is where a significant amount of money is spent every year.
The interior ministry’s protection programme ran €2.6 million in 2018, €2.8 million in 2019 and has only risen since, according to the figures released by the ministry.
Meanwhile, Matignon’s own spending on perks such as cars and secretarial staff hit €1.58 million in 2024, up 11 per cent on the year before.
The trend is only upwards, driven by France’s chronic political instability.
Since 2022, France has churned through seven prime ministers — four of them in 2024 alone — with some barely lasting months in office. They were Jean Castex (2017–2020), Édouard Philippe (2020–2022), Élisabeth Borne (2022–2024), Gabriel Attal (240 days in 2024), Michel Barnier (99 days in 2024), François Bayrou (270 days from December 2024 to September 2025), and now, appointed yesterday, Sébastien Lecornu.
Out of this long roll call, at least five are still young enough to claim certain perks down the line.
Under a 2019 decree on the status of former prime ministers, they can request personal secretarial staff from the State for up to 10 years — provided they are under 67 and no longer hold an elected office or public post.
The same applies to chauffeured cars. And, of course, all of them remain entitled to police protection, at no cost to themselves but at permanent cost to the taxpayer.
During his last speech as prime minister to the French National Assembly on September 8, Bayrou urged the country to cut spending, saying that France should control expenditure and excessive debt.
