Opening watch of the Olympic Games. Around Anne Hidalgo, incandescent tension and ultimate meeting in which Thomas Jolly, prime contractor of the most insolent and the most risky opening ceremony ever designed in the history of Olympism, participates. Tight jaws and tense hands, the quintet has just learned the arrival of the rain, the weather ballots are formal. At the yardstick of the runs announced, the tiny team reviews each scene, each table, deciding in the emergency which move, delete. The crisis unit has been working for a few minutes when the phone of one of the participants, a close collaborator of Anne Hidalgo, displays a call from Lucie Castets, the city’s finance director. His interlocutor texts cannot be able to drop out; Would she have forgotten how serious the hour is? Would there be an extreme emergency? Yes, replied, in writing and in substance, the mistress of the Parisian budget, yes there is an emergency. He leaves the room, calls him, thinking of a financial cataclysm, and listening to him to tell him that she is the candidate of the NFP in Matignon, the potential Prime Minister, the information is about to go out, that’s it, here She considers correct to warn him.
At the end of the line, the interlocutor, amazed, promises to remind him as soon as possible. Back in the room, aside whispered with the mayor of Paris, then the five continue, concentrated, their settings, every minute counts, outside the clouds obscure the sky. It is an understatement to say that the timing of Lucie Castets has dilted Anne Hidalgo’s cabinet, who will strive for the following days to convince the young enarch, appreciated for her work, that she has no chance of being appointed By Emmanuel Macron and that she has, in this funny adventure, only blows to take and much to lose. Nothing helps, the young woman wants to believe in her chances. The following weeks, these same people slide her a warning: above all, if she wants to find her post at the end of the summer, which she does not go to the summer universities of LFI, the proximity displayed with the Troops of Jean-Luc Mélenchon would constitute, for Anne Hidalgo, an irrecoverable betrayal. The enarque goes beyond, she goes there and publicly speaks there.
On August 28, Lucie Castets was received by the entourage of Anne Hidalgo. This time, red alert, she must resign, as quickly as possible, failing which she will be dismissed. The candidate of the NFP renames, persists, lies, to believe definitely that political games escape her. Constrained, she will finally be invited the next day in the morning of Apolline de Malherbe on BFM and RMC and will announce the town hall of Paris there. Since then, they have never exchanged again. In the corridors of the town hall of Paris, on the other hand, we had, all the fall, news from Lucie Castets in the form, recurrent, of crowning calls of NGO bosses – including Cécile Duflot, at the head of Oxfam – annoying that the former financial director is seeking their post. Then, the agitation fell.
Finally almost, because decidedly the ex-Candidate NFP in Matignon maintains a singular relationship with temporality. Last Wednesday, January 29, in Pantin, here she is celebrating her “vows of victory”, Raout to which she invited all the components, very angry with each other, of the NFP. When all of them are scared and insult the budgetary discussion? In turn, in a staging bordering on virtual reality, a representative of each party speaks, including François Ruffin, Clémentine Autain or Manon Aubry. Some socialists, too. Like Johanna Rolland, the number 2 of the PS, who came when she feared being welcomed freshly, justified and confirmed. Would Lucie Castets have a cognitive bubble, a parallel space-time in which her friends would make her believe that the union of the left is on? A remake of Good bye Lenin Parisian version?
Some clues give it to believe. Like the team of twelve volunteers who, since last August, has been working for her, gathering every Monday, exchanging daily messages and amount of videos in Gogo. Even though Thursday morning meetings of the NFP have disappeared since mid-January. The remark does not make it flank. “It’s been six months that I am told that the NFP will die tomorrow, well I reason with the objective and the result, the activists are favorable to the union, even to the PS.”
“I am not addicted to politics”
She does not flank, brave and confusing. “I am not instrumentalized by anyone. I am protected against instrumentalization because I do not belong to any camp.” One day, she recalls, Olivier Faure told her that she was able to have Jean-Luc Mélenchon swallowed “many things”, without this being criticized by the patriarch. She returns to her hypothetical parachuting in Isère, where in extremis she refused to run for the deputation. And denies having put a pressure from the rebellious.
Really ? She tells her exchange with Manuel Bompard, she observing him that she can apply without saying in which group, once elected, she will sit. And he, answering him, icy: “If you do that, it will not be well taken, at least we do not do your campaign, at worst we put someone against you.” If it is not a pressure stroke, it looks like it.
A few months pregnant, she is now working part-time as a consultant, having set up a company advising NGOs. “I answer offers from international organizations, my rhythm is more chopped, but it leaves me time to see people, who feed me intellectually,” she says, smiling. Does she regret this crazy summer, her naive ardor and this obstinate positioning, in which she, and she alone, lost so much? “I do not regret the way we did it, it was quite miraculous that it happens as well.”
As well? Certainly, the neophyte in politics is catchy. She notes that she is no longer in contact with politicians, the leaders of the diffracted NFP are moving away, “everyone has her life, in the constituency”, she said, kindly. “I have a specific posture, I am not addicted to politics, if I have the impression that it does not lead to anything, I will do something else. Afterwards, I don’t know what it would do me to leave everything This is exciting to have the feeling of being able to contribute to the political life of your country. ” Not “addicted”, but damn taken all the same. And if alone.
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