Candidate. He could be a candidate … in Algeria. He smiles: we have brought him back in recent weeks the countless newspapers on which the Minister of the Interior has since multiplied his arms with Algiers.
A Star is Born. And the first surprised is called Bruno Retailleau, ex-Mister Nobody During the 2022 competition for the Presidency of LR – he had nevertheless reached the second round, bowing to Eric Ciotti. He did not expect to become the phenomenon of main opinion of the post-dimension, he wants to avoid any grayery but “sudden membership”, according to his expression, cannot escape the best informed man in France .
Notoriety can be a trap. Monday, February 10, the deputy of Loire Antoine Vermorel, who had already supported him five years ago, receives four SMS inviting him to mobilize for the meeting that Laurent Wauquiez must hold Thursday, February 13 in his region, in Valence . This feels the announcement of candidacy. He immediately alerts the Beauvau place, the relatives of Bruno Retailleau want to draw first. A Minister of the Interior can invite himself to the 8 pm Journal when he wants, but is it the right place to reveal his ambitions for the conquest of LR? After reflection, the former senator decides to be “militant among the activists”: it was by an internal letter sent to the activists he declared himself this Wednesday morning.
For a long time, in the team of Bruno Retailleau, it was whispered that an insurmountable obstacle would stand on its way towards its own ambition: its physique. Bruno Retailleau is a menu, very, and it is not his frugal food diet (white fish, without sauce, or veal liver) which would allow him to round off. However, the thickness that is required or hoped for a statesman can only be intellectual. On television must be completed. In the meeting, occupy the scene, in a television duel, to defeat the opponent … When we show up, moreover, as a man on the right advocating rooting, appear a little heavy, weighted, supports the message. Can we take over someone against their will? Difficult.
But since his arrival has been a strange phenomenon in Place Beauvau. Discovering the minister on Mayotte’s images, his advisers, who remained in mainland France, exclaimed: “He still lost weight!” Then, galvanized: “But it is no longer a subject.” The interior satiated their boss. The weight and density of the first cop costume of France endowed Bruno retailleau with a quantity of responsibilities which make anecdotal, almost insignificant, its slimming. The habit makes the monk.
“I became Sarkozyst”
So much so that since his installation at the Ministry of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau has taken himself for Nicolas Sarkozy. Yesterday, he judged the former president, let’s say … trivial. Souvenir of an exchange of almost 10 years old when there had not been a question of Hannah Arendt. What can have in common the one who decides to be accompanied in each of his offices by the portraits of Georges Clemenceau and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny and the one who chose to sprinkle corridors and parts of his lair on rue de Miromesnil de Carla clichés Bruni Aanguie? Today, a trajectory. Barely installed Place Beauvau, Bruno Retailleau takes care to claim and listen to – which changes from Emmanuel Macron – the opinions of his predecessor, as turbulent as he seems austere. Very quickly, the former president, who has always been wiped out of Laurent Wauquiez, advises him to present himself to the presidency of the Republicans. On this point, Sarkozian philosophy is categorical: always take what there is to take. We are not targeting a presidential election by letting the chance of strengthening its power before the ballot.
Retailleau may repeat, laughing barely, “I became Sarkozyst”, he replied to two of his friends who question him during the winter and a few weeks apart on his presidential ambition: “I do not have the virus.” Can we do more anti-Sarkozian? But he has in common with the ex, a solid, loyal and strategist entourage which intends to contaminate it. For weeks, for months, the members of his cabinet spoke, tormented, in order to persuade him that this election at the head of LR could be the second step of his ascent. The click? Some, on the right, swear his name is Laurent Wauquiez. His behavior during the appointments of successive governments, his way of wanting to hold out of the Retailleau nourished sad passions in the latter. Moral righteousness can always be transformed into resentment.
Free, said Nicolas Sarkozy, in his ascent towards the summit. An Interior Minister is not free, and Bruno Retailleau even less than others, a member of a heterogeneous government, trapped in an inextricable configuration – he calls this “political discomfort”. Not free from his word, at least less than Laurent Wauquiez. Not completely free from its action, and this is a dilemma that the rising figure of the right must resolve in its heart. As long as he can show that “the right that comes to power can assume its software”, it will not be caught up in the patrol taken by its now opponent. But that it moves away from the necessarily simple positions that his party has long defended in opposition to confront the complexity of reality and its difficulties will be exploited, and they will be all the more it is under the lights Projectors. One of his colleagues from the Bayrou team says: “I saw him coming with his thunderous remarks on the OQTF then he had to prepare the trip of Emmanuel Macron to Morocco and the DGSI (General Directorate of Internal Security ) showed him 600 individual cases. This is a question that Laurent Wauquiez will not ask.
He will not participate in the vote and for good reason. Emmanuel Macron has been discovering his Minister of the Interior for a few months, he is “inhabited”, he says of him – speech by expert? This is all the new challenge of Bruno Retailleau: do not make a mistake.
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