A storm in a glass of water.
By responding to the press on the schooling of her three boys at the private Catholic Stanislas establishment, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra hoped to avoid controversy.
But she had no idea that an unfortunate “little phrase” –
“a bunch of hours that were not seriously replaced”
in the public, would trigger an endless controversy with twists and turns.
Apologies, forgiveness, rebuttals... Nothing has been able to appease the wrath of the teaching unions and the left.
On the contrary, each new declaration by “AOC” had the effect of a barrel of oil thrown onto the inferno of protest.
The Prime Minister wanted to take National Education to Matignon, so the eternal quarrel between public and private resurfaces.
This is not the first time that the “little phrase” of a newly appointed minister has threatened to drag an entire government into a rut.
Some were singled out for statements incompatible with the political line of the executive.
Others defended themselves clumsily, following a revelation in the press.
Whatever the nature of the misstep, opponents and political adversaries rushed into the breach, only too happy to be able to discredit the newcomers from the outset.
From Mitterrand to Macron,
Le Figaro
returns to these “little sentences” with major controversies, which hindered the first steps of a government.
Also read: Children in private school: “The minister's comments highlight the failure of national education”
Cayeux and “those people”
At the start of Macron's first five-year term, upon his arrival in government, Caroline Cayeux, former figure of the RPR, the UMP then LR, was the subject of a controversy launched by the magazine
Têtu
.
Around a hundred deputies, local elected officials and activists criticized her in a forum for comments made in 2013. She then described marriage for all and adoption for same-sex couples as “a
reform of whim and design which goes against nature
".
A week after being appointed Minister for Local Authorities, Caroline Cayeux maintained her remarks.
Adding, however, no doubt hoping to put out the fire: “
I must tell you all the same, I have a lot of friends among these people.
Frankly, this is a bad case that has been made against me and it upsets me a lot
.”
Quite the contrary: the expression “
those people
” caused an outcry.
Caroline Cayeux ends up saying she “
regrets ” her “
stupid and clumsy
” comments
.
Also read: “These people”: repeated controversies aim to mask public powerlessness”
Montebourg requires an “inflection”
Three years earlier, Arnaud Montebourg, then Minister of the Economy, had deliberately attacked the policies of his own government, after the socialist president at the time François Hollande had confirmed his economic choices to the press.
Montebourg, who had already directly opposed the prime minister of the time Jean-Marc Ayrault, had then demanded with Benoît Hamon - then Minister of National Education -, a "
inflection
" of the executive's policy, four only months after being reappointed to the Valls government.
Faced with such an affront, the Prime Minister declared that his minister had “
crossed a yellow line
” and submitted the resignation of his government the next day.
Hamon and Montebourg had of course been excluded from the new government team.
The deputy secretary general of the Élysée, still unknown to the general public, had replaced the rebel from Bercy;
a certain Emmanuel Macron.
Emmanuel Macron and the “illiterate” workers
In September 2014, barely appointed to the second Valls government, this same Minister of the Economy Emmanuel Macron, after visiting a slaughterhouse, described
some of the employees as “
illiterate ”.
“
There are a majority of women in this slaughterhouse, many of whom are illiterate!
“, he said on Europe 1 before expressing “his regrets” to the National Assembly, in the face of the outcry caused by his remarks.
Also read: Arnaud Montebourg and Bernard Accoyer: lessons from France’s nuclear fiasco
A little sentence which, despite the passing outcry, will not prevent the tenant of Bercy from experiencing the political rise that we know him to have.
President Macron has, since then, always been familiar with the “little phrases”: “
people who succeed and people who are nothing
”, “
crazy money
”, “
refractory Gauls
”...
Nicolas Sarkozy and his kärcher
Years earlier, in June 2005, Nicolas Sarkozy also caused a scandal as minister, before entering the Élysée.
When he made his famous statement on the suburbs to be “
cleaned with kärcher
”, the Villepin government of which he was Minister of the Interior was only three weeks old.
The sentence was dropped in the city of 4000 in La Courneuve: “
Starting tomorrow, we are going to clean the city with Kärcher.
We will put in the necessary manpower and the time it takes, but it will be cleaned up.
» The words shock part of public opinion.
The left unanimously denounces them.
But Sarkozy will continue his momentum, relying on the image of a firm, free-speaking minister in his race for the presidency of the Republic.
Hervé Gaymard has “no money”
A few months earlier, in February 2005, Hervé Gaymard had not been able to turn things to his advantage.
A fleeting Minister of the Economy in the third Raffarin government, under the presidency of Jacques Chirac, Gaymard caused a scandal two months after his appointment.
The
Chained Duck
revealed that his family lived in a luxurious 600 m2 duplex rented for 14,000 euros per month at state expense.
The person concerned had become entangled in the scandal by justifying himself thus in
Paris-Match
: “
I have no money.
Obviously, if I were not the son of a shoemaker-shoe merchant, but a wealthy bourgeois, I would of course own my apartment
.
Except that the press revealed a few days later that the minister owned two houses in the provinces and three apartments - one in Paris and two others in Savoie - and that the Gaymard couple paid the solidarity tax on wealth (ISF).
Also readNicolas Sarkozy - Sylvain Tesson: power, literature, Russia, love and God
MAM: “resolve” the situation in Tunisia
Five years earlier, Michèle Alliot-Marie probably expected less to shock.
Appointed at the end of 2010 as head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the third Fillon government, the minister slipped three days after the fall of Tunisian President Ben-Ali and the uprising of part of the Tunisian population.
At the National Assembly, “MAM” declared that “
the know-how, recognized throughout the world, of our security forces, makes it possible to resolve security situations of this type
”.
The minister was criticized, with part of the public interpreting these remarks as support for the Ben-Ali regime.
Would the affair have taken on such magnitude if it had been confined to this statement?
A few days later, the
Chained Duck
made several revelations about the “MAM” vacation in Tunisia, a few months earlier, when the first demonstrations had begun.
In February, François Fillon himself admitted that Michèle Alliot-Marie authorized the delivery of tear gas grenades to the Tunisian police after being appointed to the Quai d'Orsay.
On February 27, 2011, “MAM” ended up resigning.
Also read: Michèle Alliot-Marie: “The certainties of the new world advocated by LREM have imploded”
Alain, Léon, Damien and the others
There was some Alain Madelin in Arnaud Montebourg's rebellion.
President Chirac's Prime Minister of the Economy was also sidelined for having too clearly displayed his disagreements with the economic policy defended by Matignon.
Appointed to Bercy in 1995 in the first government of Alain Juppé - against the latter's advice - Madelin was in favor of an economic policy that was too liberal from the prime minister's point of view.
The tension reached its height the day Madelin declared to the press that he wanted to call into question “
certain acquired advantages
”.
The Bercy tenant attacked public service retirees who contribute less for a shorter period of time than those in the private sector.
He denounced the family of RMists who “
earn more than, on the same level, the family where we get up early in the morning (...) to earn the minimum wage
”.
Just three months after appointing him, Juppé obtained the head of his minister, who was forced to resign.
We have to go back to the Mitterrand years to find the minister who holds the record for the most short-lived stint in government (a record equaled by Thomas Thévenoud in 2014, for his unpaid taxes).
Appointed on June 29, 1988 as Minister for Health in the first government of Michel Rocard, Léon Schwartzenberg was pushed out nine days later for positions that were, to say the least, iconoclastic in the government of the time.
Schwartzenberg had publicly proposed systematizing AIDS screening among pregnant women and was in favor of the legalization of cannabis.
Also read: Alain Madelin: “There is no peace possible with Hamas”
Judicial saucepans
The panorama of these media disasters would be incomplete if we ignored the governments splashed from the outset by legal challenges.
“Matters” much more serious than a “little sentence”.
Such as Mediapart
's revelations
about Damien Abad in May 2022, which led to the opening of an investigation for attempted rape the following month.
The defector from LR and short-lived Minister of Solidarity, Autonomy and People with Disabilities, was not returned to the Philippe government after the legislative elections.
Five years earlier, François Bayrou had only spent 35 days at Place Vendôme.
After the revelations of the
Chained Duck
in the affair of the Modem parliamentary assistants, the Minister of Justice was dismissed after the 2017 legislative elections. But the new ministers' troubles with Justice do not date from the election of Emmanuel Macron.
For example, on May 23, 1992, just one month after the appointment of the first Bérégovoy government, under Mitterrand, Bernard Tapie resigned from his post as Minister of the City.
The businessman had just been indicted for misuse of corporate assets in the Toshiba affair... before returning to the government in December, after a dismissal of the case.