We can still smell the fresh paint under the immense wooden staircase of the new Polytechnique building, in Palaiseau (Essonne). With a navy hoodie with the school’s coat of arms on her back, Energy Minister Olga Givernet enters the room accompanied by her security officer. On this rainy Monday, she came to complete her “Executive Master” defense, training intended for senior executives that began in September 2023. Long before the dissolution, long before her appointment…
“My engineering diploma is 20 years old and it is important to renew myself,” explains the forty-year-old, elected MP in 2017. Doing the same job for forty years no longer exists. I believe in lifelong learning. Each course taught me something about energy or artificial intelligence, shedding light on topics we were likely to vote on. »
60,000 euros for training
Presentation pointer in hand, the minister scrolls through the slides in the small room. The collective end-of-master’s project is simple: develop a company with five employees specializing in plastic recycling, whose owner is retiring. “The materials are recovered directly from the companies, to avoid the costs of collection, sorting, transport and CO2 emissions,” she explains to the jury. These are the strengths of this model. »
“This small company is my father’s,” explains Olga Givernet at the exit. Everyone had to arrive with their project at the start of the training and it was selected. Continuing the activity was above all a simulation. This allows us to realize the constraints of an entrepreneur in an environmental sector and to combine it with the desire to develop broader public policies. »
The minister teamed up for several months with four other students from this “Innovation technology and management” master’s degree to work on a business development project.
Paris Match / © Philippe Petit
An Energy Minister who is working on the takeover of a private plastic recycling activity nevertheless raises the question of a potential conflict of interest. “I only work on energy issues, not on plastic, that’s Agnès-Pannier Runacher’s portfolio,” she continues. It’s waterproof. The High Authority for Transparency in Public Life also looks at this. »
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“As the in-depth verification of declarations of interest is underway, we are not communicating on this subject at the moment. This could take several months,” HATPV told Paris Match. This case illustrates the crest line on which politicians sometimes walk when considering a return to the private sector.
We cannot be told not to engage in politics for life and not be allowed to prepare for the future.
Olga Givernet
Before her, former minister Jean-Baptiste Djebarri had followed this prestigious master’s degree and faced the insinuations of golden “recasing”. “It’s the most cutting-edge training in science and technology,” retorted Djebarri, member of the defense jury on October 7. Real resettlers don’t go through that…”
“We cannot be told not to engage in politics for life and not allow ourselves to prepare for the future,” adds Olga Givernet. Pursuing our profession, doing training, is what anchors us in real life. »
To follow the courses taught in particular by two Nobel Prize winners, the minister was selected “among several thousand applicants for a class of 36 people” and had to pay 45,000 euros in addition to the 15,000 financed by the National Assembly (€10,000 granted under the conditions determined by the College of Quaestors and €5,000 for the monthly advance of mandate fees, the training having a direct link with parliamentary activity. Terms defined by a decree of November 29, 2017, Editor’s note). “For the rest, I took from my savings and asked my husband for a loan,” she explains.
A financial and family investment, at the rate of fourteen weeks of courses – including three in Toulouse, Berkeley and Munich – in addition to his work as a parliamentarian. “I have two daughters aged 13 and 15, I had them on the phone often… And their father was there every evening. » Now a minister, she takes the train on Friday evening to join her family in Ain, a stone’s throw from Geneva, where she worked for a time and where her husband runs a company.
The couple met during a study internship in Lyon and settled in this region after three years in New Zealand, at the start of their professional careers.
Olga Givernet will know at the end of 2024 if she has graduated. Until then, its government roadmap must begin to be implemented: control of energy costs, sobriety in production and consumption; relaunch of nuclear power and deployment of renewable energies “while controlling the impact on the landscape”.
We don’t have to leave Polytechnique to fulfill such a mission, but it can help…
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