It's a face that we will see very regularly from now on. Little known to the general public, Sophie Primas, the new government spokesperson, will now have the task of debriefing the Council of Ministers every week. An unprecedented mission since the 62-year-old former senator, long affiliated with the Republicans (LR), is the first government spokesperson not to come from the presidential party.
And the least we can say is that this close friend of the LR President of the Senate Gérard Larcher and the Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau, does not have her tongue in her pocket. For several years, Sophie Primas did not hesitate to openly mock the man who is now her boss, François Bayrou. Several of these tweets, unearthed by an LCI/TF1 journalist, have resurfaced in recent days.
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“There you go!” Bayrou leaves the government… exit the Modem which has become useless »
Like many people on the right, the betrayal of François Bayrou in 2012, when he called to vote for François Hollande and not Nicolas Sarkozy, stuck in his throat. The new government spokesperson is also one of those who rejoiced when he had to leave the government in 2017 after a month, caught up in the affair of the MoDem parliamentary assistants. “There you go!” #Bayrou is leaving the government… exit the Modem which has become useless… let the “constructive” LRs think about it…” she tweeted.
She also did not hesitate to comment on her accession to the position of high commissioner for planning, in the summer of 2020. “This is a reward for Mr Bayrou, without control of parliament, without control of the Prime Minister, without application of non-cumulation…”, she explained at the time. “Hello, I’m back!” But where has the new world gone? », she wrote even more recently, in February 2024, when François Bayrou said he was available for Matignon.
“A story that is sometimes a little tumultuous”
At the end of the first Council of Ministers this Friday, Sophie Primas defended the “irony” of these messages and took responsibility for her past differences with the head of government. “Everyone knows that I am not a Macronist from the start, nor even a member of the MoDem. My political family is the Republicans,” she said in an introductory statement during the report of the Council of Ministers, referring to “a sometimes somewhat tumultuous history” between the right and François Bayrou.
Sophie Primas, who was already Minister of Foreign Trade in Michel Barnier's government team, says today that she fully assumes her new responsibilities: “We are in a period of institutional instability where we have changed Prime Ministers three times in one year. We will have to find ways of passage and move this new team forward together,” she confided to Monde.
