Before the announcement of the next government, the resigning Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau remains omnipresent

The new Prime Minister François Bayrou is consulting the political forces this Monday and Tuesday to try to achieve a majority before forming his government. Will Bruno Retailleau be part of it? Current events oblige, the tenant of Beauvau is on all fronts.

In Bruno Retailleau's daily life, censorship has changed almost nothing. Meeting on the migration crisis in London, reception of the Pope in Corsica, and cyclone in Mayotte. The Minister of the Interior – who has resigned – is one of the only ones still on deck, because of current events. Useful for proving indispensable when one's own position is at stake, and when the new head of government multiplies contacts to form his next team. Upon leaving a crisis unit in Mayotte, Saturday December 14, the new Prime Minister even gave up his place during a press briefing. A scene that calls attention to where we see François Bayrou, as if annoyed at not being questioned on the subject, leaving the stage, leaving his ministers in the lurch, reinforcing, perhaps unwittingly, Bruno Retailleau.

Bruno Retailleau is the resigning prime minister that François Bayrou received on Friday December 13, a few hours after his appointment, to exchange their visions on the future. “It’s a good signal, assures franceinfo a right-wing strategist,“the best gateway to Les Républicains”. Since even if relations are tense between their boss Laurent Wauquiez and Bruno Retailleau, party figures swear by the latter. The influential boss of the Senate Gérard Larcher continues to push his name, the same for Michel Barnier, whom he privately describes as “constant, loyal, efficient, from start to finish”. The ex-senator gives color to the right according to his entourage.

Around him, we are convinced that his presence in government allows the right to “reopen a channel in the brain of the French”confides one of his relatives to franceinfo. It was necessary before “working like dogs to get an interview, now a simple tweet and we have ten shows behind”. For some, the period helped Bruno Retailleau to make an impression, in particular the distance between the president and the Prime Minister. “He emerged from the silences”thinks a Macronist elected official. This space allowed him to go all out, those around him admit that he does not give himself “the usual limits of a minister”, that the risk of censorship encourages him to “embody fights and take risks, on that he is a son of [Nicolas] Sarkozy”.

Will he stay in Beauvau? Too early to say, those around him remain cautious: “We are only at the beginning of discussions on the government's overall line, if we have to pursue a policy far from its convictions it will not stay”. We understand that the resigning minister can renounce an immigration text, but that the subject will have to be taken up. For François Bayrou the equation is perilous: keeping the Vendéen risks making him lose the left, but without him, it would mean having to do without the right.