France’s longest-serving news anchor has been dismissed from his primetime role at France Télévisions, the French state-owned broadcaster.

For 16 years, David Pujadas has been the face of primetime news on France’s public broadcaster, delivering the daily headlines, interviewing presidents and world leaders, hosting election debates and earning fans and critics in equal measure for his gentle, non-confrontational style.

In a surprise announcement, France 2 said Pujadas’s long broadcast career with the channel would be coming to an end. He will anchor the evening news for the last time next week after being fired just days after Emmanuel Macron became president.

The news came the day after Pujadas’s 8pm news programme recorded its highest audience of the season, beating its closest rival, the private channel TF1.

France Télévisions insists Pujadas’s removal is not connected with Macron, who promised to sweep the board clean and bring in new faces across French public life during his election campaign.

But the unexpected announcement shocked the news presenter and sparked a newsroom revolt. “It was not my decision and it hasn’t been explained,” said Pujadas. Another France Télévisions journalist said staff were “astonished”. “We had no idea it was going to happen,” he told Libération.

The National Journalists’ Union (SNJ) said the timing was “catastrophic” and threw doubt on the independence of the state broadcaster. Union leaders called an emergency meeting to discuss how to respond to what they described as an “unusual destabilisation of the whole production team”.

Delphine Ernotte, head of France Télévisions, denied the decision not to renew Pujadas’s contract was politically motivated. She told staff she wanted to give the flagship news programme a facelift. “He’s covered four presidential elections. I believe it’s time to give [the news programme] a new look. There’s no point waiting for things to go badly to change,” Ernotte told Le Parisien.

Pujadas, 52, who is half Spanish, was born in Barcelona and grew up in France. He joined TF1 as a reporter in 1989 and covered the Romanian revolution, the first Gulf war and the siege of Sarajevo. He was hired by France 2 to present the nightly news in September 2001.

In 2011 he interviewed Barack Obama and in 2015 flew to Damascus to meet Bashar al-Assad, one of few western journalists to interview the Syrian president since the start of the civil war.

Pujadas was due to finish presenting the 8pm news programme at the end of this month, but announced on his Facebook page that his last broadcast would be next Thursday, leaving France 2 scrambling to find a temporary stand-in.



When the new television season starts after the long summer break, he will be replaced by Anne-Sophie Lapix, who presents a talk show on France 5.

• This article was amended on 7 June 2017. An earlier version said Pujadas was the first journalist to interview Assad since the start of the civil war. This has been changed to one of few western journalists.

