A statesman respected by a large part of the political class, known to the general public for having been Minister of the Interior during the 2015 attacks, Bernard Cazeneuve, close to François Hollande, could be a Prime Minister around whom Emmanuel Macron could try to build a center-left majority. His name, in any case, came up insistently during the summer, even if the person concerned denied several times having spoken with the president.
Minister under François Hollande
The head of state and his putative Prime Minister know each other well: they were together ministers under François Hollande. Emmanuel Macron was Minister of the Economy, while Bernard Cazeneuve was Minister of the Interior. A five-year term that he ended at Matignon where he spent a little over five months – a record for the shortest tenure on rue de Varenne under the Fifth Republic – after the resignation of Manuel Valls. But relations between Bernard Cazeneuve and Emmanuel Macron cooled when the latter flew to the Élysée: the deputy from La Manche accused him of a lack of “loyalty” towards François Hollande and a lack of “elegance”.
A career as a lawyer
A month after leaving Matignon, he returned to his mandate as a deputy in the National Assembly. But Bernard Cazeneuve announced in July 2017 that he was resuming his career as a lawyer by returning to the business law firm August Debouzy in Paris. This firm’s clients include ArcelorMittal, Volkswagen, Microsoft, Orange, Dassault Systèmes, SNCF and Nike. According to journalist Vincent Jauvert in his book Les Voraces: les élites et l’argent sous Macron, published in 2020, “never, during the Fifth Republic, had a Prime Minister joined the private sector so quickly”, in this case, “immediately after leaving office”, with hiring negotiations having begun even before his departure from Matignon.
Former socialist
In 2022, Bernard Cazeneuve announced in the regional weekly La Manche Libre his departure from the Socialist Party after the creation of the New Popular, Ecological and Social Union (Nupes) in view of the legislative elections. “I left the Socialist Party in disagreement with the alliance made with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party,” declared Bernard Cazeneuve, referring to “a political party, La France Insoumise, whose violence, outrageous positions, and insults I had to endure when I was in government, particularly when Rémi Fraisse died,” an activist who died during a demonstration in 2014, when Bernard Cazeneuve was Minister of the Interior. “I also have a clear and firm conception of secularism, of the Republic,” he continued, “which prohibits any convergence with those whose thinking on these issues is more than ambiguous.” Finally, François Hollande’s last head of government (2016-2017) invokes “an old hostility of the LFI to the European project.” Creation of his own movement
The former Prime Minister wants, in June 2023, to reconnect with a “left without decibels but with solutions”, during a gathering for the creation of his movement, the Convention. “It is the left of government that changes life that you are seeking to revive”, declares Bernard Cazeneuve in front of around 2000 people, before launching into a speech in which he evokes France, its language, its culture and its history. Very severe on the “strategy of confrontation” developed by La France insoumise for six years.
This article is originally published on tf1info.fr
