WE SAW – This documentary, broadcast Friday at 8:50 p.m., depicts the pugnacious personality of the Minister of Culture, a rare survivor of the government’s dissolution. While leaving aside his political struggles and convictions.
With a bit of irreverence, good interlocutors and useless sound effects that make us think of a documentary on a sordid news item, BFMTV strives to paint the portrait of Rachida Data. From the city of Bout du Lac, in Chalon-sur-Saône, to the golden years of the Republic under which, a rare minister who survived the dissolution, she continued to pursue her career. The channel titled this documentary Rachida Dati, the unsinkable. The “ambitious” was no longer available. The expression appears in the title of the three previous films dedicated to Dati, on Arte, Public Senate and France 2…
She would probably not blush at this qualifier. Rachida Dati, we observe her from one television extract to another broadcast in the documentary, takes pleasure in retracing her astonishing journey. The nerve that allowed him to land a job in a clinic at 16. Then, later, a job at Elf by approaching the then Minister of Justice, Albin Chalandon, to whom she paid a vibrant tribute on his death, in 2020.
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“She knows how to be loved”
Rachida Dati is not afraid of anything. This is what those who subsequently discovered it, in 2002, in the office of Nicolas Sarkozy, at the Ministry of the Interior, repeat. « She had an ability to create extremely strong relationships »limits himself to explaining Claude Guéant, who was part of it. Another collaborator, who wishes to remain anonymous, insists: « She has a talent for entering into people’s lives.” And adds: « She didn’t want to or didn’t know how to put together a file or write a speech. » But, now, the former protégé of Simone Veil appears endearing. She laughs, she shakes the torpor of the ministries a little.
If she « knows how to be loved »in the words of journalist Catherine Nay, Rachida Dati also knows how to make herself hated when necessary. The documentary dwells, relying on the bitter memories of MP Gilles Legendre or former minister Agnès Buzyn, on the blows she inflicted on her political adversaries.
To protect her interests, according to BFMTV, when she was Keeper of the Seals, she also had a subject removed from “Sept à quatre”, the TF1 show. His brother Jamal was preparing to testify about his past as a delinquent. An intervention by Dati would have made it possible to avoid this possible bad publicity.
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Indicted since 2021
Has this pugnacious, rather elusive figure, whose struggles and political convictions unfortunately go by the wayside in this film, crossed other red lines? In the European Parliament, Rachida Dati, with suspicious attachment according to a German MEP, defended amendments favorable to the oil and gas industry. The investigation stopped there. On the other hand, the Minister of Culture is the subject of an indictment for corruption and passive influence peddling by a person invested with a public elective mandate.
She is suspected of having received, as a lawyer, 900,000 euros from a subsidiary of the Renault-Nissan alliance, without compensation for real work, between 2010 and 2012, while she was a European deputy. When confronted with questions from RTL last April, she replied: « Did you ask Robert Badinter any questions about his clients? » Definitely ready to do anything to convince.
