JULIEN DE ROSA / AFP
Bruno Retailleau, Minister of the Interior under Michel Barnier, remains in the government of François Bayrou in the same position.
POLITICS – Three weeks after the fall of Michel Barnier’s government, overthrown by a motion of censure from the National Assembly, a new government team arrives. Well, not so new since many outgoing ministers are reappointed and a handful of others are returning to the helm.
As for the enlargement wishes of François Bayrou, who claimed to want to appoint a third of personalities from the right, a third from the left and a third from the center, without depending on the National Rally, they ended in failure. Overview of this new hitch which has already been widely criticized.
Many leavers reappointed
Among the names announced by the secretary general of the Élysée Alexis Kohler, many were already in office under Michel Barnier. Bruno Retailleau (Interior), Jean-Noël Barrot (Foreign Affairs), Sébastien Lecornu (Army), Annie Genevard (Agriculture), Agnès Pannier-Runacher (Ecological Transition), Rachida Dati (Culture), Benjamin Haddad (Europe), François Gatel (Rurality), Charlotte Parmentier-Lecocq (Disability), Marc Ferracci (Industry), Clara Chappaz (Digital), Valérie Letard (Housing) and Thani Mohamed Soilihi (Francophonie) will thus be able to resume their files where they left them.
Five others change portfolio: Catherine Vautrin moves from Territories to Labor and Health while Laurent Saint-Martin leaves the Budget for Foreign Trade. Sophie Primas (ex-Foreign Trade) is the new spokesperson while François-Noël Buffet moves from Overseas to Security and Nathalie Delattre (ex-Relations with Parliament) arrives at Tourism.
Four heavyweights as ministers of state
This was also a wish of the head of MoDem: to appoint a strong government, of personalities identified by the French, who could defend their cases in the media and bring them to the public. Previous government teams have sometimes been criticized for lacking notoriety. The four Ministers of State (Élisabeth Borne at the super-ministry of National Education and Higher Education, Manuel Valls at Overseas, Gérald Darmanin at Justice, Bruno Retailleau at the Interior) significantly turn the tide .
The whole question will now be to manage these strong personalities who, for some, might want to stand out and stand out from the crowd. Not to mention the next presidential election, which some are thinking about insistently even if the candidates who think about it the most (Gabriel Attal, Édouard Philippe, Laurent Wauquiez) have stayed out.
The elders of the left
Can they really be considered spoils of war? Manuel Valls, François Rebsamen and Juliette Méadel join the government. Without their left-wing pedigree being able to convince. Certainly all three of them had, during their lives, their Socialist Party membership. Certainly they belonged to the different governments of François Hollande (Manuel Valls even led two). But they have long been out of touch with the left. As early as 2017, Rebsamen signed a column calling to vote for Emmanuel Macron. In 2022, he explained that he voted for the outgoing President in the first round.
Ditto for Manuel Valls who, in 2017, when he participated in the socialist primary (won by Benoît Hamon), he revealed his intention to slip a Macron ballot into the ballot box. Since then, Manuel Valls has become a repulsive figure for the entire left (socialists included). As for Juliette Méadel, after having been Secretary of State responsible for aid to victims of terrorism under François Hollande, she turned away from the PS to the point of being expelled from it. As early as 2017, she also called to vote for Emmanuel Macron rather than Benoît Hamon.
Source: www.huffingtonpost.fr
