“If I don’t embody freedom, I don’t know what I can embody. It’s genetic to me.” This is how Rachida Dati defined herself in this summer of 2022. The right has taken advantage of this freedom for years. How many television debates where she burst the screen? How many adversaries sent to the carpet with a murderous formula, released in a great burst of laughter? This freedom, the mayor of the 7th arrondissement of Paris is using it this time against her family. Rachida Dati was named Emmanuel Macron’s Minister of Culture this Thursday, January 11, sealing the break with her family. “She places herself outside our political family. She is no longer part of the Republicans,” comments LR boss Eric Ciotti in a press release, promising to “draw the consequences of her choice.”
The Republicans (LR) ended the year with a bang, crowned with a political victory on the immigration law. Finally they demonstrated their usefulness to the National Assembly. Finally they found the political oxygen of which Macronie and the RN had deprived them for six years. Here they are again with their heads underwater, an aging and shaky mirror of the power in place. The arrival of Sarkozyst Catherine Vautrin at the Ministry of Labor, Health and Solidarity only reinforces this impression. The quest for singularity, the Sisyphean myth of the right. “It’s another nail in the coffin,” analyzes an LR deputy. “That complicates things,” adds another.
Eric Ciotti didn’t see it coming
“Rachida, it’s better to have him with you than against you.” On the right, this maxim is repeated over and over again, in a smile tinged with fear. “Rachida” is unpredictable, her legend is written. Who has not heard of the Homeric anger of the former Minister of Justice, with the temperament of a bulldozer? Eric Ciotti always cajoled her. As soon as he was elected president of LR, he named her president of the National Council of LR, a sort of parliament of the party. He is probing her to take the head of the party list in the European elections. She does not follow up, favoring her Parisian ambitions.
The Nice man did not see this farewell coming. Rachida Dati informed him of this this Thursday. He had previously confided to Bruno Retailleau that the head of state would not draw from the LR pool. On the right, no one really expected it. “We are out of this game,” an LR leader recently confided. “Macron needs the LRs in the Assembly too much to allow himself to provoke them by poaching.” Magnifying glass. The head of state could not resist this little pleasure, even if it meant targeting the 62 LR deputies, the pivotal force of the Lower House. This Thursday he attracted a heavy warning from Eric Ciotti. “This government does not have a majority. The choices that have been made may contribute even more to the fact that it does not have a majority.”
The right, collateral victim of Paris
The right loses one of its leading figures. Rachida Dati hopes to win Paris. An obsession. Defeated during the 2020 municipal elections, Rachida Dati wishes to dislodge Anne Hidalgo from City Hall in 2026. She is certain of this: only an alliance between the right and Macronie can satisfy this ambition. “I am a fan of the Sarko method,” she theorized with a Parisian majority executive. “We all come together in the first round. We make a big score and we create the dynamic for the second.” Rachida Dati puts this conviction into practice, she pushes her advantage to be the unifying figure. “It’s a political calculation. She wants to carry an LR-macronist list,” notes a senator from the Ile-de-France region. Thus, the minister affirmed her wish to remain a member of the Republicans during a videoconference bringing together Parisian parliamentarians and district mayors a few hours before the formalization of her appointment.
Here is Eric Ciotti collateral victim of local ambitions. And the right with him. The recent trajectory of Rachida Dati matches that of LR. In February 2022, she was one of the first to express public reservations about Valérie Pécresse’s presidential campaign. In an interview with Figaro, she warns against “technocratic postures” and calls on him to show “transgression” in his project. Rachida Dati, or the art of saying out loud what many are thinking quietly. In March 2023, she calls for a “government agreement” between LR and Macronie after the forceps adoption of the pension reform. Her party did not follow her, she implemented her own advice ten months later. Of course, for personal reasons. But from this sequence, we will remember the arrival of a new right-wing minister in the government. Macronie takes on the air of UMP 2.0. “I hope it continues,” laughs a deputy from the right wing of Renaissance. LR is rather tired of drinking the chalice down to the dregs.
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