This time, no Trafalgar coup. Unlike the election in the fall of 2021, when Bénédicte Durand, the interim director, was excluded from the process during the auditions with the selection committee, the favorites for the direction of Sciences Po qualified for the final stage, Friday, September 6. A tight duel is looming, on September 19 and 20, between diplomat Luis Vassy, 44, current chief of staff of Stéphane Séjourné, and lawyer Arancha Gonzalez, 55, director of the School of International Affairs at Sciences Po, Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs between January 2020 and July 2021.
Alongside them, the third qualifier, the academic Rostane Mehdi, 58 years old, director of Sciences Po Aix, will have to prove wrong the predictions that attribute to him an outsider position. This law professor, a supporter of a program to refocus the institution on its fundamental missions, symbolically won the “primary” of the IEP directors that pitted him against Pierre Mathiot, in post at Sciences Po Lille. According to our information, the public position taken by the latter on the Averroès high school – criticized for anti-republican values, the Muslim establishment had a partnership with Sciences Po Lille, and Mathiot had defended it – raised eyebrows among several members of the jury. Faced with the controversies, the time seems this time for appeasement. Hence the search for a diplomatic profile, like a return to the sources: the first post-war director of Sciences Po, Roger Seydoux, was a senior civil servant at the Quai d’Orsay.
Temptation of a prefect
A few months ago, however, Sciences Po could have been led by a prefect, a way of staging the return of order in a school shaken by the resignation of its director Mathias Vicherat, sent to court for a case of mutual domestic violence, and especially by unbridled pro-Palestinian activism. At Matignon, several voices advocate for such a profile. On March 18, François Heilbronn, associate professor at Sciences Po, member of the IEP council, also submitted the hypothesis to Emmanuel Macron and Gabriel Attal, during the 80th anniversary of the CRIF. Arguing, six days after the stormy occupation of the Boutmy amphitheater by the school’s Palestine committee, that a prefect experienced in zones to defend (ZAD) would be needed to take energetic measures. Several names, such as those of Gilles Clavreul or Frédéric Potier, former directors of the interministerial delegation for the fight against racism, anti-Semitism and anti-LGBT hatred, have begun to circulate. “But Sciences Po is not a ZAD?”, replies the head of state, taken aback.
From these first rumors, Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, president of the National Foundation of Political Sciences (FNSP), the institution that oversees Sciences Po, opposed a prefect profile. Too bad a signal, she said. Go for a more “classic” senior civil servant, decides Gabriel Attal, who is nevertheless critical to the point of inviting himself, on March 13, before the board of directors of the FNSP, and slipping in that “the fish always rots from the head”. But there is no rush of candidates to exercise the six-month interim before the new election. State Councilor Patrick Gérard, director of the ENA between 2017 and 2021, refuses. Edouard Geffray, the Director General of School Education, also declined, even though he was a candidate for the management of Sciences Po in 2021. The name of Jean Bassères, present in the first “short lists” proposed by Sylvie Retailleau, the Minister of Higher Education, became an option. Called shortly before the weekend of March 23, the former Director General of Pôle Emploi took up his duties on March 26.
In his new position, the soon-to-be-64-year-old financial inspector has remained steeped in his previous experience: he is convinced that Sciences Po and its 14,000 students are not necessarily more complex than Pôle emploi and its 58,000 employees, the institution he led for twelve years. He theorizes not to put himself forward with the students: the crisis will have to be managed calmly, behind the scenes, without excessive outbursts. Pro-Palestinian activist associations soon take offense: we did not introduce ourselves to them. On April 17, the disciplinary summons of about twenty students lead to a blockade of the stairs of the presidency for three days. Soon a nighttime occupation of the premises is interrupted by the CRS, on April 24.
Letta gives up
At the same time, on May 11, the call for applications for the management of Sciences Po was published in the Official Journal. About twenty applicants declared themselves, but no big names, neither Agnès Buzyn, nor Jean-Michel Blanquer, nor Najat Vallaud-Belkacem. Former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, director of the School of International Affairs at Sciences Po between 2015 and 2019, seemed to hesitate for a moment. But the timing was disastrous: he had to declare himself before June 19, and Letta was interested in a European post after the June 9 elections. He passed on his turn, not without noting that Arancha Gonzalez, his successor at Sciences Po, with whom he shared a seat on the board of directors of the Jacques Delors Institute, was interested.
This lawyer has spent nearly twenty years of her career in international institutions, first as spokesperson for trade for the European Commission, then as chief of staff to the head of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Pascal Lamy. Between 2013 and 2020, she headed the International Trade Center, a UN and WTO agency based in Geneva. Her political experience is limited to her eighteen months as head of Spanish diplomacy; where Pedro Sanchez calls her as a figure of civil society. Her opponents do not fail to recall one of the supposed reasons for her dismissal, in July 2021: in April 2020, she knowingly welcomed Brahim Ghali, the president of the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi independence movement, to Spanish territory, registered and treated in a hospital under a pseudonym.
Appointed to Sciences Po in February 2022, the French-speaking Arancha Gonzalez has had time to build relationships in the teaching sphere. She is now seen as the candidate most supported by the university body. In her program, proposals for modernization in small touches, less emphasized in any case than in that of Luis Vassy. The diplomat, ambassador to the Netherlands between 2019 and 2022, proposes to take into account the “triple crisis” affecting Sciences Po, a crisis of “image, project and governance”. He imagines more initiations to research, an assumed explanation of the French republican model or the creation of a school of ecology, in order to perpetuate the “Descoings software”, named after the former director, convinced that Sciences Po must compete with the great American universities, while claiming the French identity of the school.
The future director will have to manage a tight budget: in the event of a drop in state funding or private sponsorship, tuition fees will have to be increased. Some negative signs have appeared from the donors: on June 19, Politico announced that American billionaire Frank McCourt had suspended his €2.5 million annual funding to Sciences Po, pending the appointment of a new director. Similarly, LVMH has chosen to refrain from funding this year’s Sciences Po alumni gala, which was disrupted by pro-Palestinian activists.
ENA factor
Within Sciences Po, several observers are now imagining a tight double ballot, on September 19 and 20. Everyone has noted that the procedure for appointing the director is complicated and could lead to an impasse: the IEP council and the FNSP board of directors must agree on a name.
But the first instance is dominated by the school’s teachers. In 2021, they largely opted for Mathias Vicherat, but what will happen this time? One of Luis Vassy’s weak points is that he presents a CV that is similar to that of the former director, who is also… his former classmate at the ENA, in the Senghor class. At the FNSP, on the other hand, the profiles of senior civil servants are traditionally appreciated: in 2021, when the instance was renewed, four ENA graduates were co-opted for six positions. Will Arancha Gonzalez’s very international profile then work against him? In any case, the two councils have an interest in reaching an agreement: in the event of a final disagreement, the call for applications would have to be started again… from the beginning.
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