3:24 p.m., Thursday, January 25. A “note to the editors” from Amélie Oudéa-Castéra’s press service falls into the journalists’ mailboxes: it announces a trip to a technical and vocational high school near Orléans. Start of the visit at… 4:30 p.m. Or an hour later. The team of the new Minister of National Education would like to discourage the press from covering the event because it could not do so more effectively. The day before, she had already gone, impromptu, to a college near Reims: according to the local newspaper L’Union-L’Ardennais, who managed to join the excursion at the last minute, the teachers were forbidden to talk about the trip to allow the minister to “avoid embarrassing questions” linked to the cluster of controversies which punctuated her first days Rue de Grenelle. Would Amélie Oudéa-Castéra want to disappear from the radar? Treat yourself to a media diet? “We don’t rush to the plateaus, that’s for sure, we recognize within our team. And then, what’s the point of organizing tense microphones at the end of college if all the questions have nothing to do with them? to do with the displacement?”
The risk is significant, it is true, but proportional to the ordeal experienced by Amélie Oudéa-Castéra since her promotion in the new government of Gabriel Attal. A way of the cross rarely observed for a minister who is entrusted with the priority file of a five-year term, committed with these few words: “We saw lots of hours which were not seriously replaced, at one point we got fed up”, declared the one nicknamed “AOC” to justify the placement of her eldest son at the private Catholic school Stanislas, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. However, these absences from Littré public school never existed. There she is caught in the act of deception, in front of teachers and especially parents, where her predecessor had taken his position by grooming them. An MP remembers what a lady he met in the South-West told him: “The problem is that now I know that the Minister of Education is a liar.”
Amélie Oudéa-Castéra probably did not imagine that she would experience her first whistles and boos in front of a wooded schoolyard. On the morning of January 16, she arrived in Littré to take a vow of penance. The Minister of Education realized that she had plunged this renowned public establishment into deep disarray. “It is the best public school in the neighborhood, it is extraordinary. And, unfortunately, the episode had a considerable impact on the teaching staff and the parents of the students,” regrets Maud Gatel, the MoDem deputy for the Paris constituency , who had no choice but to apologize to the school principal the day after the minister’s unfortunate statement. Now it’s Oudéa-Castéra’s turn to apologize. Some evil tongues, within the government itself, believe they know that it was Matignon, wishing to keep Education in his fold, who sent his minister to the pillory “to shoot her”. In reality, the instruction was given directly by the Elysée: we need a purge, a real one, a beautiful one, to start from scratch. “The trash cans are emptied, now it can only go back up,” said those around Emmanuel Macron.
On the contrary, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra digs into the revelations that abound in the press. Since then, Stanislas’s ultraconservative orientations, notably homophobic, have been highlighted; Mediapart revealed that the minister had placed her son in a single-sex class and that the school had set up a Parcoursup bypass system, which her director confirmed on the BFM TV set. “It has reopened, in spite of itself, the entire public-private conflict,” lamented a member of the government who appreciated it. All opponents of the private system see it as an opportunity to resume the fight and, in fact, it gives them a legitimate take to say that the State does not have to finance Stanislas’s delusions.” Recently, a parliamentary report highlighted the “very high, even abnormal” remuneration of French sports bosses, including that of Oudéa-Castéra when she was head of the French Tennis Federation. An uninterrupted stream of revelations which worry her government colleagues, both on her morale – “She looks really very tired, she is in a state where I am starting to be a little afraid for her”, confides a minister – and on this construction site. the Education that she takes with her in her fall.
Added to the damaged image on the outside is the loss of credit on the inside. If Gabriel Attal is annoyed – to the point of not seeming to rule out his hasty replacement – it is not only by this Advent calendar of bad news where every day, or almost, contains an affair. The clumsiness of his successor also considerably undermined the link he had managed to forge, in the space of only six months, with the national education union organizations. On January 15, a handful of hours after the revelations of Release on her lies concerning her son’s departure for the private sector, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra meets the teachers’ representatives at the ministry in an icy atmosphere. The unease is palpable: many describe her as decomposed, livid, condemned to open the round table with a string of excuses. The one whose meticulousness and fighting spirit were praised when she only had Sports in her portfolio disappoints her interlocutors with an abstract, lacking in scope, apathetic speech. The metamorphosis of “AOC” surprises Elisabeth Allain-Moreno, the general secretary of SE-Unsa: “I have worked with her in the past, notably on the sports program at school, it had been very productive, I I had in front of me a person who had confidence, convictions, and strength. I no longer recognized at all the politician I had known.” How can we repair what was broken from the start with these unions not known for their indulgence? Is this even possible? “For colleagues, she is already pigeonholed, burned. We don’t see how we could support a minister who has so many pots on her hands,” says the president of the National Union of High Schools, Colleges, Schools and Higher Education (Snalc) Jean -Rémi Girard.
If Amélie Oudéa-Castéra sees her lease extended on Rue de Grenelle, these are not treasures, but marvels of inventiveness and pugnacity that she will have to deploy so as not to be abandoned in the open countryside by this important part of her clientele. At the Elysée as at Matignon, we do not expect to relive the end of Jean-Michel Blanquer’s reign. For now, Emmanuel Macron is procrastinating: he is testing his minister until the second phase of the composition of the government and is betting on the decline in business. But when you are in National Education, can you really get out of such a reprieve?
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