Is it a casting error or a broader recruitment problem? Appointed prefect delegated to equal opportunities to the prefecture of Gironde just over a year ago, Lydia Guirous, former spokesperson for the Les Républicains party, is the subject of six reports for psychosocial risks. The report of the report of an occupational doctor delivers an assessment reporting a “toxic management” and a “proven suicidal risk” among agents, AFP learned on January 25, confirming information from South West. The possible questioning of its prefect status will be subject to a decision in the Council of Ministers which should take place “around mid-February”, it is explained in Beauvau, while a procedure for its dismissal has been initiated by the Ministry of the Interior.
Extracts from the minutes of the Social Committee of Administration (CSA) of the Gironde prefecture, which the Express was able to consult, reflect the complicated arrival of the new prefect. The question of “means” (recruitment of a chief of staff, a secretary, a residence staff and a driver) devoted to this function – whose installation is seen as a surprise by staff – is laid. As early as November 2023, Laurent Castagna, Delegate Force Ouvrière, warns the delegated prefect “who arrives in a house, a world that she does not know”. According to the trade unionist, he has been going back since his arrival “behaviors that we had no longer had the habit of knowing in the prefectures, since the old regime”.
The collaboration between Lydia Guirous and her agents will not improve. A little more than a year later, in a CSA of January 9, 2025, the occupational doctor “reports a real harassment and toxic management of the service of service”. The interested party disputes this diagnosis: in a press release, Lydia Guirous claims to have “always paid the greatest attention to (her) teams” and claims a “contradictory procedure” to “restore the truth”. A mediation procedure with the ministry is underway, according to his lawyers. “As soon as she arrived, she complained that she did not have the necessary means, that her office was not good, that the temperature of the room was too high …”, says a deputy from the region, who Relax: “I was embarrassed, a prefect should not say that to an elected official, it is moved”.
Multiplicity of profiles
Shortly after arriving at the prefecture in 2023, Le Canard Enchaîné had revealed that she had “mobilized” the rectorate of Bordeaux to register her children in schools in Gironde, and to find them extra-curricular activities. Lydia Guirous, who had never exercised in the prefectural administration, benefited from a reform of the high public service aimed at diversifying profiles. Several other personalities had thus entered the prefecture, the entrepreneur Thibault Lanxade, appointed prefect of Indre, or a former CGT leader, Marilyne Poulain, named prefect delegated to equal opportunities in Bas-Rhin.
These prefects inherited their function during a Big Bang: a movement of “unprecedented magnitude”, to use the words of the Ministry of the Interior of the time. Announced on July 14, the 2023 vintage led to 36 job changes. Among these, 15 prefects were appointed for the first time. Since 2021, the long requiring routes to climb the ladder before finally becoming a prefect no longer exist. Most senior officials are brought together in a single body, that of “administrators of states”, and can go from one function to another. In theory, a finance inspector can become a prefect, then director of central administration, then ambassador – and vice versa. The Ministry of the Interior brought into the “prefectural” a former ambassador to Brussels, Claire Raulin, who became a pre -Pét du Lot in 2023. The former director of the Strasbourg Regional University Hospital Center, Michaël Galy, was appointed prefect of The Nièvre.
Managerial vision
To these new prefects from the administration are added profiles so far foreign to senior officials. Newcomers sometimes “poorly welcomed” because “not well perceived by senior officials hanging on their cap”, according to the entourage of Lydia Guirous, who sees in the reports deposited a desire to get rid of the old cnews editorialist. “It is true that the first two months were not simple. We were expected at the turn, is suitable Marilyne Poulain. When we arrive in the prefectural with a very different type of course, there are prejudices. To tame and now, it’s better “.
The arrival of these private defectors did not always go wrong – although it was sometimes accompanied by a culture shock. “It took a little adaptation time, suits Marc Fleuret, president of the Departmental Council of Indre. But the prefect Lanxade brings a different look, that of the administration”. In Indre, Lanxade thus surprised by imposing the globbish of the business world and the codes of its 25th anniversary in the private sector. “He considerably reduced the meeting time, welcomed Gil Avérous, mayor of Châteauroux. Discussions which took an hour and a half are now limited to forty minutes”. Adept at a “very managerial vision” of his administration, he shares a common trait to many newcomers: that of putting a particular accent to listening to the field, his actors and his elected officials.
Political profiles
In the Bas-Rhin, Benjamin Soulet, assistant to the mayor of Strasbourg, also praises the “field” approach to Maryline Poulain, a prefect delegated “to reports less marked by the hierarchy, more horizontal”. “I had rubbed shoulders with prefects as part of my union functions, takes up Marilyne Poulain, who quotes her” mentors “in the profession, including Louis-Xavier Thirode, Deputy Director of the Minister of the Interior, or Patrice Faure , Director of Cabinet of Emmanuel Macron.
“The prefective prefects of the prefectural may have a different approach, linked to their journey and their training. In general, a prefect addresses the different local situations with a very legal and administrative look. Salima Saa, for example, had A more political approach, which tended more to listen to the lifts of the field, “explains Bernard Combes, mayor (PS) of Tulles, in Corrèze. Coming from the corporate world, Salima Saa had, like Lydia Guirous, mity to the UMP. Named before the reform of the High Public Service, in 2020, she had been one of the first “Macron prefects” for two years in Corrèze, before becoming briefly two years later Secretary of State responsible for the Equality between the Women and men of the Barnier government.
Jean-Marie Girier, long-standing collaborator of the Minister of the Interior Gérard Collomb, then campaign director of Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 presidential election, also became a prefect of the Territoire de Belfort that year. He chained the prefectures, going from Belfort to Vienne, then, now, to the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. “It may have happened that new entrants in the prefectural body come out after two or three years – the usual duration of a prefectural function. Generally, this means that they are not satisfied with what they found In the public, notes Gildas Tanguy, lecturer in political science at the Toulouse IEP. in body logic “. After Lydia Guirous on departure, how many “Macron prefects” will experience a new assignment next year?
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