Last Saturday evening, at the presidential palace in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), where he accompanied President Emmanuel Macron on his tour which first took him to the bedside of Mayotte then to the troops in Djibouti, Sébastien Lecornu dodges the questions, on the eve of the announcement of a new government. “Silence,” he says somewhat mysteriously in the African night, “is the secret of longevity. » Expert word. At 38 years old, the inexhaustible Minister of the Armed Forces (since 2022), who came from the ranks of LR like his mentors Bruno Le Maire or Édouard Philippe, is the only one to have sat continuously in the government since 2017, when he started at the State Secretariat to the ecological transition. He is in his sixth Prime Minister, his fourteenth reshuffle!
He is also an outsider regularly cited for Matignon. His name thus circulated before the appointments of Gabriel Attal, Michel Barnier and, most recently, François Bayrou. Always placed, never winning. To hear him say, he has never been and still is “not a candidate” for the chair of Prime Minister. He assures that he “gives everything” to the Ministry of the Armed Forces, where he “lives his best political life”. A real “fana mili”, confirms a senior officer: he does not “spare his time spent with the troops, as when he went to explain the military programming law to the regiments (LPM) ».
