“I was offered it but I refused”

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The pedigree of Jean-Yves Le Drian gives him the build of a statesman. Former mayor of Lorient (1981 to 1998), several times deputy (between 1978 and 2007) and president of the regional council of Brittany (twice between 2004 and 2017), he also and above all exercised sovereign functions for 10 years.

10 years minister

The Breton who the ear and confidence of the President of the Republic was appointed Minister of Defense in 2012 under the five-year term of François Hollande. In 2017, he became Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs, a position he held until 2022.

While he was a member of Socialist Party since 1978, Jean-Yves Le Drian left his political party to try to bring together his former comrades around Emmanuel Macron.

For a little over a year, the President has made him his personal envoy for Lebanon.

Why not him?

Naturally, his name appeared among the eligible candidates for the estate of Michel Barnier in the coveted and formidable Prime Minister's suit.

A hypothesis all the more credible since if Michel Barnier embodies an authority figure anchored to the right of the political spectrum, Jean-Yves Le Drian would undoubtedly have the build to embody the perfect counterweight to the left.

So we asked him the question. To which he responded without tongue in cheek and with humility.

It was offered to me. But I refused. In two and a half years I'll be 80, that wouldn't be serious.

“The main person concerned knows,” he added with a knowing smile. “You won’t have any surprises tomorrow…”

Applauded by a thousand people

This confidence was delivered to us during a brilliant conference, on the theme of “the shift of the world”, given on Thursday December 12, 2024 in Saint-Brieuc and organized by Cerfrance Côtes-d'Armor.

“We are in a complex world,” introduced Jérôme Lejart, president of Cerfrance Côtes-d’Armor. “Who better to tell us about it thanan exceptional speaker and moreover Breton? »

More than a thousand people took their places in the Hermione Room, at the Congress and Exhibition Center, and for an hour drank the words of the man who became a expert in geopolitics.

To claim to summarize this presentation in a few lines would be offensive. We will remember that “we entered into a completely new era of History” and that “the happy globalization that we believed we knew since the fall of the Berlin Wall has suffered a sudden breakup« .

An unpredictable world

Jean-Yves Le Drian endeavored to describe the unpredictability, the impunity, the crisis of the rule of law, the indictment of the West, the return of the “desire for empire” of powers such as Russia, China or Iran, the temptation of nuclear proliferation…

“We are in the geopolitics of force,” he warns. “Only one solution for us: strengthen Europeits sovereignty and its strategic autonomy. » Defense, energy, health, agri-food, digital, semiconductors… The examples and challenges are numerous.

Anyone who believes that it will now be necessary to “find new forms of international cooperation » will not become Prime Minister but, without a doubt, will continue to bring his enlightenment to the highest summit of the State for some time to come.

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