“What matters is speaking in 1958, not 1956.” This April 20, Laurent Wauquiez justifies to L’Express his media discretion, the path taken to enter the Elysée in four years. The agrégé d’histoire is not lacking in emphasis. Would France suffer a new Algerian crisis? Is our Republic living its last hours? And he, boss of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, would he have the shoulders of the great Charles to overturn the table?
The analogy can make you smile. It illustrates the strategy of the former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy: sobriety through rarity and grandiloquence on the merits. Laurent Wauquiez carries an overhanging speech, which mixes seriousness and ostensible rejection of partisan contingencies. In an interview at Figaro, the elected official describes the urban riots as a symptom of a “disintegration of the State and the nation” and warns against an “ideology of deconstruction”, the supposed source of French ills. He advocates “sacred union” – a concept forged during the First World War – around measures aimed at responding to the crisis.
“He doesn’t hit like a deaf man”
Laurent Wauquiez household Emmanuel Macron and Gérald Darmanin, “animated with good intentions”. The head of state was already relatively spared by the regional president in an interview with Point. The former president of LR adopts the same behavior during more informal exchanges with the press, focusing on the structural weaknesses of France. “He doesn’t hit like a deaf man, it’s new and it gives him stature. Not leading the party allows that,” rejoices an LR executive. “He understood that it is not the level of decibels that would break the political sound barrier,” adds another. “Desert of the soul”, “hate of the province”…: the violent attacks of the former president of LR against Emmanuel Macron are over. Leniency? Simple strategy. Laurent Wauquiez is eyeing the Macronist electorate with a view to 2027. The head of state cannot run for re-election. It is useless to attack him personally and to attack his supporters.
Personal attacks would above all be contradictory with the narrative sketched out by the putative candidate. Laurent Wauquiez describes a country “in decline”, bogged down by “the impotence of the State”. “What strikes me is the weakening of power, and not of Macron, he confided to L’Express in April. A whole political system has become blocked. A theoretically overpowered executive has become a chained Gulliver.” The rulers would not be incompetent, but weak. Political choices are less targeted than the disintegration of the exercise of power. The former minister thus pinpoints the “secession” of part of the administration or the growing influence of the Supreme Courts. “You put someone in the cockpit, he moves the joysticks and it has no more impact, he insists. We have to change the way we fly the plane, otherwise it will not produce anything. “
Wauquiez, or the self-proclaimed return of politics. A literate policy. The man, armed with diplomas, peppers his interventions with cultural references. Here, an allusion to Plato and the “stasis”. There, a criticism of the ideology carried by the philosophers Bourdieu and Derrida or a reference to the historian Jacques Bainville. We are far from the Wauquiez wrapped up in his red parka, long suspected by his critics of hiding his culture and weakening his vocabulary to “make people”. Emmanuel Macron has been there. “The French need to admire their president, provides support. They want someone above them and not at their level, which is Xavier Bertrand’s problem.”
A suitable posture?
The diagnosis made by Laurent Wauquiez is powerful. The recommended remedy is still awaited. In his call for “sacred union”, the boss of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region is content to take up the historic measures of LR, such as the suspension of social assistance to parents of offenders or the return of minimum sentences. Sarkozy in the text. The only innovation: the construction of a system of merit scholarships from primary school onwards. In the spring, his proposal to reduce the judicial control of laws or to put down the independent administrative authorities aroused the reservations of lawyers. The Wauquiez offer is coherent, but its musical setting is still stammering. Beware of the banal overhang.
A question remains: is this posture adapted to Laurent Wauquiez? The man does not enjoy strong popularity. Minister under Sarkozy, ephemeral party president, regional boss… He belongs to this category of leading elected officials that the French do not yet see at the top of the state. “This overhanging strategy works when your word is expected, as Edouard Philippe, judges an LR strategist. It is bad when you are at the bottom of the polls.” This is the case: recent opinion polls give Laurent Wauquiez between 5% and 7% of the presidential vote. The interested party remains faithful to his method. He has four years to prove the cult replica of Thierry Lhermitte in Cons Dinner : “It’s not the strategy that worries me, it’s the strategist.”