the two faces of Darmanin facing the right – L’Express

LR knows him too well. And he is starting to get annoyed by the “arrogance” of the minister, defeated this Monday during the vote on the motion to reject the immigration law. Too many provocations. Too many little barbs thrown, smirking, in the hemicycle. This Monday evening, Elisabeth Borne calls Éric Ciotti on the phone. The president of LR is annoyed with the Prime Minister by the tone of the boss of Beauvau and asks her to now be his interlocutor on the text. The boss of the group Olivier Marleix sends a text message to the head of government. She calls him back. During their exchange, he will also make allusions to the behavior of the impetuous Darmanin.

Amazing Gérald Darmanin. The former mayor of Tourcoing had set himself the objective of winning around twenty LR votes to form a majority on his immigration law. He used it in a curious way. Diplomat in private, bulldozer in front of the cameras. “He buys in private and insults in public,” Olivier Marleix summarized this Tuesday at a group meeting.

Let’s start with the seducer. The Minister of the Interior is making numerous phone calls and meetings with LR deputies, whom he knows by heart. During an examination of the security budget in the law committee, the deputy for Belfort Ian Boucard sharply criticized it before disappearing for a vote in the hemicycle. He immediately receives a text message from the minister: “It would be good if you came back! I will answer you.” In short, he “treats” people, as we commonly say in politics. And what do the warnings of Olivier Marleix matter, who implores his troops not to follow up on his requests. Gérald Darmanin speaks to the right, who returns it well. At the end of November, Beauvau was exposed to the forum prepared by constructive deputies on the immigration bill.

But this outstretched hand is covered in nails. In public, Gérald Darmanin is never shy of barbs towards his former family. Here, an arrow fired against Olivier Marleix. There, a criticism of the migration policy carried out under Nicolas Sarkozy, which he aims to correct. This December 7, LR defends in the hemicycle its proposed constitutional law (PPLC). Gérald Darmanin lets the debates drag on and has fun. He calls out “chaos in our legal order”, evokes the “political difficulties” of LR and refers Éric Ciotti to his status as ex-collaborator of Christian Estrosi, his intimate enemy.

We have known a more inspired seducer. LR number 3 Annie Genevard doesn’t understand. “Why did you hit so violently?” she asks Gérald Darmanin after the doghouse. The person concerned denies having been vehement. “You shouldn’t have been there during the doghouse,” a young LR deputy whispers to him, given the risk of friction. “If I had not been there, you would have said that we were not considering your text,” replies the tenant of Beauvau. Éric Ciotti hardly appreciated the sequence. And it’s not over. The next day, Gérald Darmanin had lunch in Nice with Christian Estrosi. Not just anywhere. The two men meet at the “Bistrot du port”, opposite Eric Ciotti’s office. And when the right is reluctant to support him, the minister brings out big Bertha. He half-heartedly mentions the responsibility of LR in the event of a crime committed by a foreigner covered by the law, if the text were not to be adopted.

Darmanin, the man with two faces. An LR deputy notes: “We have two Darmanin: the Darmanin on the phone, enveloping and caressing. And the Darmanin in the hemicycle, who needs to throw scuds in the face.” This duality is not the primary cause of its failure. But by all accounts, it didn’t help him. A sort of icing on the cake. How to explain it? The right is lost in hypotheses. “It’s an astonishing psychological trait,” says Eric Ciotti privately. The first reading is strategic. Gérald Darmanin is not targeting rank-and-file LR deputies but the party staff. Divide and conquer, a technique as old as politics. “He wanted to buy the guys individually and ridicule the executives,” judges an LR advisor.

Other LR connoisseurs have a more intimate reading of the character. Gérald Darmanin is above all a player, or even, according to a former ministerial advisor who knows him well, “a child” who “teases, teases, then says to himself ‘damn, I’ve gone too far'”. Politics is made up of good words, why deprive yourself of small pleasures? The young forty-year-old is not a doctrinaire like Senator LR Bruno Retailleau. Rather a follower of old-fashioned politics, where we can confront each other in violent oratorical battles before laughing about it a few minutes later. Where we can endorse a measure before the right-wing Senate before endorsing its deletion in the Assembly’s law committee a few days later with the same force of conviction. But like the Abbé de Villecourt in the film Ridiculous – guilty of one too many witticisms in front of the King of France – we can get tripped up.

It is then necessary to repair the broken dishes. This Monday, December 11, a senior LR executive received a phone call from Gérald Darmanin’s chief of staff. Alexandre Brugère is trying to dissuade the right from voting for the motion of no confidence. “You will appear divided because not everyone will vote for it. And if the motion does not pass, you will look stupid,” he explains in substance. Too late. But since when?

This is the story of a photo that the right has never forgotten, never forgiven, never digested. On May 11, 2017, François Baroin, leader of the Republicans for the legislative campaign, Christian Jacob and Éric Woerth are on the train, heading north. The photographer of Paris Match approaches to capture the moment, a man comes to sit on the armrest of a seat: Gérald Darmanin. He is still there a few hours later, when François Baroin warns the LR elected officials tempted to join Emmanuel Macron: “Hostage taking, not war taking.” On May 17, he is still in the photo, but the faces around him are no longer the same – he is named Emmanuel Macron’s minister.

At the time, Aurélien Pradié still advocated loyalty to the party line. He refuses to go to Bercy, to the office of the new Minister of Public Accounts. “We were really friends, we hate each other now, he said then. He was the fourth to congratulate me on my election. I ended up agreeing to visit him, I asked him: how do you explain that to your parents? To the activists?” The Lot deputy targets him more than all the others. “Macron theorized poaching to an extreme point, he explains. Bruno Le Maire or Edouard Philippe did not betray, it is their ideology. Darmanin is something else, he betrayed because ‘He wasn’t on that line. He betrayed what he thinks ideologically.’

At the head of LR, the presidents parade, Laurent Wauquiez first, then Christian Jacob, soon it will be Éric Ciotti. Gérald Darmanin laughs: “When I see what the Republicans have become, it’s getting worse and worse. They’ve changed presidents twice, they haven’t improved their situation.” Laurent Wauquiez and he hate each other. During the right-wing primary, Gérald Darmanin is put forward by Nicolas Sarkozy more than Laurent Wauquiez, and he is also a protégé of Xavier Bertrand, whom the president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region dedicates just as much to vilification – double penalty ! These people are sensitive…

With the passage of time, being the most visible of the Sarkozysts is no longer enough to mollify the right, the new world has taken up all the space. Brice Hortefeux, the historical faithful, has a head full of memories, he has not forgotten that Darmanin “disappeared in 2016 when the polls were falling”: “This is the generation of traitors, of recycled people.” “Help him, who spits on us when we are the ones who fed him?” : politics is a matter of memory…

Immigration could not rhyme with reconciliation. The subject is too explosive. “I tell the right that it is a text which fixes the stupidities of the right, says the Minister of the Interior privately. If Ciotti votes against, he will end up at 2%. Where is the text of the government party LR?” In the home stretch, it is true to say, Place Beauvau raises its voice again: “Each time the LRs of the Assembly are in the politics of the worst and want to shake up the government, it is not not them who are rising in the polls, it’s the RN. Three quarters of the LR group know that their leader has put them in a solution with no future, they will end up being the crutch of the RN. It is a Bonapartist party without Bonaparte .” Soon, Gérald Darmanin will experience his Waterloo.