Former socialist minister of François Hollande who joined the macronie in 2022, François Rebsamen, appointed Monday Minister of Regional Planning and Decentralization, is above all passionate about his hometown, Dijon, of which he was mayor for 23 years.
Promoter of a social and European left, this 73-year-old man, affable but outspoken, confesses a “visceral attachment” to the Burgundian capital and should retain his mandate as president of the metropolis of Dijon.
Like Prime Minister François Bayrou, François Rebsamen staunchly defends local roots and in 2013 opposed the law on the non-cumulation of mandates.
During the Hollande era, François Rebsamen, friend of the former head of state, provided the latter with unfailing support on all other subjects, from the benches of the Senate, where he was the leader of the socialist group, then majority.
This loyalty will be rewarded with the post of Minister of Labor in 2014. But François Rebsamen is unable to absorb the three million unemployed and he is given the nickname “minister of unemployment”.
In 2015, he left this position to return to his chair as mayor of Dijon, following the death of his first deputy, Alain Millot, to whom he had entrusted the reins of the city.
– “Extreme danger” –
Withdrawn on his Burgundian lands, the one we call “Rebs” had little involvement in the 2017 campaign. After the first round, he signed a platform calling for Emmanuel Macron to vote to beat Marine Le Pen.
In 2021, he returns his apron as boss of elected socialist officials, accusing the party of no longer “speaking to popular circles”, of being “sectarian” and of no longer having “a vision”. However, he keeps his PS card.
In the process, he supports Emmanuel Macron, “the most competent” of the presidential candidates. But the one who, in 2018 accused the president of “privileging the richest”, remains opposed to the abolition of the wealth tax or the reform of unemployment insurance.
At the same time, he created the Progressive Federation, a “left government movement” for those disappointed with the PS. Hostile to the alliance with the Insoumis, he describes them as a “moral problem” for the left.
During the early legislative elections in June, François Rebsamen called for a rally in the center, around the Macronist candidates, facing “the extreme danger” of the RN.
This earned him to be cited by François Bayrou among the personalities with whom a “gathering” would be possible.
Sunday in an interview with the Tribune, François Rebsamen confided that he had “a relationship of trust with the Prime Minister for many years”.
For Arnaud Brennetot, professor of political geography and planning at the University of Rouen-Normandy, the return of a Ministry of Regional Planning “means that there is perhaps a desire to affirm a return of national land use planning policy.
According to him, it is “detrimental” to have a national territorial policy which is “not integrated into an overall strategy”, because this fuels “frustrations” and “does not make it possible to temper or counter all the speeches which criticize the State for doing it exclusively for the metropolises, for the regions which are winning, and for leaving a part of France in oblivion, in neglect.
Born on June 25, 1951 to a worker father who became a sales director and a “bourgeois” mother of Catalan origin, François Rebsamen assures that politics has “always fascinated him”. After his first steps with the Trotskyists, he joined the PS in 1979.
With a degree in economics and law, he was hired at the Côte-d'Or prefecture and, at the same time, began his rise within the PS, where he was number 2 from 1997 to 2007, before being elected senator in 2008.
In 2001, he wrested the town hall of Dijon from the right which had reigned there for 66 years. This former Freemason puts his vision of security into practice: video protection, local security councils, anti-discrimination agency.
After 23 years in office, in November he handed over to his first deputy “to make democracy breathe”, while retaining the head of the metropolis.
Discreet about his private life – he is married and the father of a daughter – he announced in 2018 that he was suffering from cancer, “for the sake of transparency”.
