“Narcocrackers are everywhere”: media omnipresence, shocking declarations… When Bruno Retailleau plays it like Nicolas Sarkozy

Appointed Minister of the Interior for more than a month, Bruno Retailleau seems determined to follow in the footsteps of another famous tenant of Place Beauvau: Nicolas Sarkozy. We see him, the words loud and the media presence asserted, surveying each crisis area, each scene of news items, like an emergency actor ready to fight. The Minister of the Interior plays the part of immediacy, appropriates the cameras, wants to be omnipresent, like his predecessor who, twenty years earlier, forged his career in sound and fury.

“Narcoracailles”, “band of scum”

Since his appointment, Bruno Retailleau has multiplied his muscular interventions and shocking formulas. “The drug scum are everywhere. We will have to fight them with implacable determination,” he announced the day after the shooting in Poitiers on October 31. A verbatim that recalls – unsurprisingly – that of Nicolas Sarkozy in Argenteuil in 2005 when he responded to a woman posted at his window: “Are you fed up with this bunch of scum? We’re going to get rid of them!” A few months earlier, it was “at Kärcher” that he offered to clean up a housing estate in La Courneuve in Seine-Saint-Denis.

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Just like his predecessor, Bruno Retailleau has understood the importance of a communication strategy based on media omnipresence. Travel, tributes, interviews… it has become impossible not to see or hear the Minister of the Interior. It's easy to imagine his office carefully planning each trip, each announcement.

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He thus follows to the letter the tacit rule of Sarkozyism: be seen acting, regardless of whether the proposed measures are still under construction or symbolic. This hypercommunication, made up of announcements and trips, seems to follow the logic of the “saturation effect”, flooding the media space in order to occupy the ground without giving others time to do so.

Nicolas Sarkozy as a “model” for Bruno Retailleau

As soon as he took office, Bruno Retailleau borrowed the warlike vocabulary of Clémenceau, from Vendée like him. “The first priority: restore order. The second: restore order. The third: restore order,” he insisted. Here again, we find the same dramatic momentum, the same urgency that Nicolas Sarkozy knew how to instill in each of his speeches. For the minister, we must give the feeling that each act is a response to a critical situation, a form of “war” to be waged.

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Bruno Retailleau does not hide his “admiration” for the former president whom he sees as “a model”. The two men had lunch together at the beginning of October, and the former president, who looks back with “kindness” on his debut, even defended him in the media. “I appreciate the beginnings of Mr. Retailleau who affirms a policy,” he declared on the set of CNEWS, questioned about the numerous outings of the new Minister of the Interior on immigration or respect for the State of law.