Bernard Cazeneuve doesn’t ask for anything, it’s his own dandyism. Ten years ago, his old friend Jean-Paul Bacquet, a socialist MP for Puy-de-Dôme, already predicted a future as Prime Minister for him. “That doesn’t exist, it’s all nonsense,” objected the man who would become Prime Minister two years later, in 2016. When François Hollande offered it to him, he simply accepted the mission that the President of the Republic entrusted to him, but he never fought for any portfolios. “There are enough narcissi in politics for us to avoid being narcissist with roses,” he once confided to L’Express. So he didn’t notice the President’s silences while in Paris and beyond the rumor of his upcoming appointment to Matignon was swirling.
He didn’t notice, but he’s surprised. Discreetly. “What do they tell you at the Élysée?” he dares to ask in a low voice when he meets friends who might have bits of information about Emmanuel Macron’s state of mind. In front of Aurélien Rousseau, his former chief of staff between 2016 and 2017, he quibbles: “I absolutely don’t believe it. He won’t appoint me.” The summer, for the former Prime Minister, was painful on a personal level, and the whispers about his possible return to rue de Varenne tormented him.
So, it’s human, he wants to understand what this elusive president has in mind. The meeting that the latter finally gives him should be the opportunity to learn more. No doubt the punctual Cazeneuve thinks that 8:45 has all the makings of the ideal time that will spare him from having to suffer the now famous delays of the head of state. Discourtesy does not spare presidents. It is twenty-five minutes late that Emmanuel Macron joins his elder.
Twenty-five minutes that clearly did not help him clarify his thoughts and expectations. A conversation about the political situation, a sober discussion, is he looking for a Prime Minister or a strategist? At least Bernard Cazeneuve can clarify one important point: you shouldn’t believe everything you hear, he is not arguing for the repeal of the pension reform. He prefers lace, which under his fingers becomes the combination of the pivot rate and the duration of contributions. The former tenant of Beauvau knows his little illustrated Macron by heart, he probably perceives the tergiversations of his strange interlocutor and senses that for Matignon, he is not – for the moment – the favorite.
“Anyone but Cazeneuve”
Who would he be the favorite of anyway? He who has a sense of state and political propriety in his body knows that these very political moments are the bed of low works, of politics that he does not like, that of chin thrusts and games of poker liar. Does he see that Emmanuel Macron is playing him? Between the four walls of the green room, that same day, the President of the Republic confided to him that he had had Olivier Faure on the phone a few days earlier. The First Secretary promised, the host recounts, that he would not censor… Xavier Bertrand, the other suitor at Matignon. A blow to the stomach. The socialists would therefore have definitively abandoned him, betrayed him even.
Who should we believe then? His friend Guillaume Lacroix? The leader of the Radical Left Party also chatted with the president. It was a week before, on August 23. Macron asked Lacroix about Xavier Bertrand. “That doesn’t arise since Laurent Wauquiez doesn’t want him,” replied the Radical Left, in front of the head of state who agreed: Wauquiez told him the same thing, and Faure too about Cazeneuve. The first secretary nevertheless assured L’Express: “I always said that we would immediately censor Xavier Bertrand,” he insisted, swearing that he had never exchanged secretly with Emmanuel Macron.
Bernard Cazeneuve doesn’t care about the promises of some, the dirty tricks of others. He understood before anyone else that Emmanuel Macron had never intended to appoint him. He says in private that Olivier Faure used energy to demonstrate his hostility. When The Opinion reveals at the beginning of September that the head of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council Thierry Beaudet is favoured by the Château, Faure does not say no. “Olivier was tempted by this idea and the technical government”, admits a socialist deputy.
It also did not escape Bernard Cazeneuve that between September 2 and 4, while the possibility of going to Matignon was not completely extinguished, the first secretary of the PS was pushing another option than his own: Laurent Berger, who had already said no to Emmanuel Macron at the end of August and had even informed Cazeneuve of this. “He himself said that he was ready to be a facilitator,” Faure hammered in front of the PS deputies. He telephoned the person concerned, who was reluctant, François Hollande and even the President of the Republic on Wednesday, September 4 to plead in favor of the former union leader, as reported by The Echoes. “At the PS, it’s anything but Cazeneuve,” the former minister’s entourage gasps. Yet another proof of Faure’s maneuvers, he believes. He heard him talk about his chimerical nomination as an “anomaly.”
Anger sometimes rises to Cazeneuve’s nose. “Olivier made a political mistake,” admit several PS deputies. Faure’s friends deny any wrongdoing. “Cazeneuve did not send a single emissary to speak to us. We know nothing about what he wanted, what he thought of the New Popular Front’s program,” hammers home the entourage of the leader of the roses, and ironizes: “The only man of the left that he supported in the legislative elections was in reality a MoDem: Olivier Falorni [NDLR : ex-PS] “Neither the leader of the PS deputies Boris Vallaud nor that of the PS senators Patrick Kanner – who has long supported him in recent years – will have received a call from the former Prime Minister.
“It’s your turn to go”
If Cazeneuve balks, it is because they have all disappointed him, these same socialists who allowed “a lynching” to take place, as he deplores to his visitors, of Karim Bouamrane – the PS mayor of Saint-Ouen whose name was mentioned for Matignon – and of himself by the former rebellious Clémentine Autain in Blois during the PS’s back-to-school university. He reproaches them for never having really reacted to the attacks of La France insoumise and the ecologists who have been accusing him for years of responsibility for the death of Remi Fraisse in Sivens, no matter the dismissal of the case by the courts, confirmed in 2021, no matter his mea culpa in a book In the face of violence (Stock, 2019) where he describes the activist’s death as “a tragedy and a failure” and recounts his tears. They have made him a new Jules Moch, named after the Minister of the Interior whom the communists and the far left have called “a murderer” and “a bludgeoner of workers”. “The socialists let it happen”, laments a fellow traveler of Bernard Cazeneuve.
Friends in politics don’t exist. We only have a few good companions, thought François Mitterrand. Is François Hollande a buddy or a comrade? We trust the former a little too easily, and we sometimes have to be wary of the latter. On August 12, on the heights of Tulle in Corrèze, it was our friend Cazeneuve who was invited to three days of feasting for Hollande’s 70th birthday, as narrated The Sunday Tribune. Benjamin Biolay, Sophia Aram, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Michel Sapin… We meet some great people. On the edge of the swimming pool, a political conversation in private around François Hollande. The press begins to gossip about the Cazeneuve hypothesis at Matignon. “What do you plan to do, Bernard?” asks the Corrèze host. “If we have a short-term vision, the left has no interest in going there. Otherwise, it must,” analyzes Cazeneuve, but Hollande cuts him off: “If we want to be the left that governs, it’s up to you to go there.”
As the weeks go by, the Cazeneuve option becomes more prevalent throughout August. Even François Bayrou supports the idea with Emmanuel Macron, but François Hollande rings other bells. The friend, who is publishing his new book on the history of the left, delivers his first words of the new school year to Point and denounces “the institutional fault” of the head of state who dismissed Lucie Castets. “Everything would have depended on the compromise she would have been able to concede to the other parliamentary groups. If she had not succeeded, the emergence of an alternative solution would have acquired a stronger legitimacy.” Not a word about his friend Cazeneuve.
“He is a talent that is biding its time,” Hollande once wrote about him, but when the time comes, where are his friends? “He absolutely refused any tactical approach within the PS, and yet it was necessary,” a socialist MP, a supporter of Cazeneuve, still despairs. To this elected official, to others, to Aurélien Rousseau too and to François Hollande especially, he reproaches them for having taken “one step too far” in defending Lucie Castets. And they respond to him, almost all in chorus: “For a Cazeneuve solution to emerge, the Castets hypothesis had to be completed, for us to note the impossibility of his nomination.”
Game postponed
Cazeneuve, abandoned by his own people? Political migraine. He hears funny stories. He is told of an exchange between Hollande and Faure, the former assuring that the Prime Minister had to be censored, whether it was Cazeneuve or someone else; that he had pushed the Karim Bouamrane option behind the scenes rather than his own. Other low blows? He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know anymore. François Hollande denies all these jokes. Proof, if any were needed, at a parliamentary group meeting, he sounds the alarm and reproaches his socialist colleagues for not vigorously defending the Cazeneuve option, and for showing a preference for Thierry Beaudet or even Xavier Bertrand. In L’Express, the former president laments that Cazeneuve was not chosen. “He would have been a cohabitant,” he said. “He was the “best placed” even. The deal is in the bag. Macron, Faure, Hollande… So many elements, bluffs and chin-raising that “reflected at least a climate,” Cazeneuve’s entourage despairs. One of his close friends even notes with relish: “François Hollande has been mourning Bernard Cazeneuve since Michel Barnier was appointed, never before.”
And now, what to do? Here is Bernard Cazeneuve back in the spotlight, never appointed but still missed. The supporters he has today have not budged, and new ones have joined in recent days. His friend Louis Schweitzer, the former boss of Renault who was already in charge of concocting the program during the aborted presidential candidacy of 2022, has returned to service at his side. “He does not insult the future, promises one of his loyalists. He does not want to stop there. He says that Michel Barnier will not stay a year, perhaps not even four months, that Lucie Castets will not be replayed, that Olivier Faure will no longer be able to be kingmaker.” His supporters do not intend to give up. He recently spoke with Raphaël Glucksmann who is preparing the birth of a political movement, and has finally renewed contact with a few socialist bigwigs.
Next time, he will know how to avoid the bullets that fly and the knives in the back. A Cazeneuve grumbler adds: “No one in the PS wants to take responsibility for leaving the alliance they made with Mélenchon, and they are all afraid of being held accountable for his excesses in 2027, for not having been able to separate from him before. They made a mistake and they will quickly hope that someone will correct it. It will be Bernard.” The Norman watches this train go by, to better jump on the next one but not at any price. While waiting for it, he has gone “to prune his roses”, says a friend. However, it is not the season.
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