The lights, like the looks, are aimed at the desk, accompanied by a midnight blue sign. Above: four letters as a program. "Dati for Paris". It is the oven, this Saturday, January 19, in the HQ of the candidate Les Républicains for mayor of Paris, installed boulevard Sébastopol, Châtelet side. Bundled up in their winter clothes, the right-wing supporters hurry to listen to the wishes of the one their political family has chosen to lead the mother of municipal battles.
Driven by a new dynamic
In the center, therefore, Rachida Dati chairs. From the height of his 55 meter, his 54 autumns and a phlegm which, never that evening, will betray the feverish desire which has acquired the place it occupies at this precise moment. Front, all front.
Around her, the heads of lists who will wear her colors in the 17 districts - between new faces, good soldiers of the right and former enemies with hatred swallowed up - all for Dati. Hated by many a few months ago, the mayor of the 7th arrondissement seems to be driven by a dynamic, and is now playing with the outgoing (PS), Anne Hidalgo.
This Wednesday, a poll of "Figaro" even gives it the lead in voting intentions. All this gives a little color to a weakened Parisian right, which for 20 years has only shone through its divisions. "Galette at will!" The candidate is in a cheerful mood. A gigantic frangipane cake has been installed, Rachida Dati distributes the first parts. No one sincerely believes that it can take Paris. But in LR, the time of an evening - of a campaign - she is the kingmaker.
From the working class to the gold of the Republic
Paris? “She has always thought about it and waited for the right moment. He arrived. She went dark, ”wrote the president (LR) of the South region, Renaud Muselier, who knew her in the European Parliament. This drowsy desire would have woken up on March 26, 2018; it was a monday. One of his elected Parisian friends wrote to him to discuss the municipal elections. He urges him by SMS: “Go for it! You will take the light! ". Some exchanges later, the interested responds: "You really made me want, and gave back fishing and rage! "
The same rage with which she made her way towards designation as head of the LR list, last November. And which will have been used to clear the obstacles installed on the improbable path which, from the fate of the child born on November 27, 1965 of immigrant worker parents, in Saint-Rémy (Saône-et-Loire), leads to the gold of the Republic .
Angel encounters or unparalleled cheek?
"All her life, she smashed the door rather than turned the handle," sums up Franck Louvrier, a faithful former adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy, who has followed Dati since his beginnings in politics. In her autobiography "Daughter of M'Barek and Fatim-Zohra" (Xo, 2011), she recounts the words of her childhood friend Valérie P.: "It seemed like you were constantly fighting", as the youngest of 11 siblings.
She sketches her own legend there: sunken doors, then hands reaching out. A destiny made up of providential encounters, or, as desired, that of an unparalleled cheeky schemer, compared to Maupassant's “Machiavellian upstartist”, Bel-Ami, in another work devoted to him (“Belle- Friend ”, Michaël Darmon, Yves Derai, Editions du Moment, 2009). "Whenever I applied for a job, a salesperson or a minister's adviser, I played my life," Rachida Dati will later tell.
A pure and hard sarkozyst
Another meeting, requested here again, will change everything: that with the mayor of Neuilly (Hauts-de-Seine), who became Minister of the Interior in 2002. Nicolas Sarkozy, she will follow him to Beauvau as an advisor, so as not to leave him (Bercy, Hauts-de-Seine, Interior again). "The most Sarkozyst of the Sarkozysts, fascinated by the big cat ..." remembers the deputy (LR) of Yonne Guillaume Larrivé, who crossed her in the Interior and praises "her exceptional endurance, a teflon side".
"She was nice, funny, in a universe that was not," recalls Marie-Hélène Debart. This young enarque was at the time a feather from Sarkozy to Beauvau, and a time "very friendly" with Dati. One time only. "She uses people and then throws them away, she has no mood," tackles Debart today.
We recognize him a media talent but files little mastered
A way too, according to her, to make up for a lack of work; too attracted, according to some, by the flashiness of Parisian life. During his two years as Keeper of the Seals, from May 2007 to June 2009, Rachida Dati will in any case ensure scrap iron "15 hours a day, when it is not more". Those who knew her at the cabinet table pout. "She had immense media talent, a real banter," recalls one of them. But ? "But she did not go to the bottom of the files". "She was a chick who did not master her subjects too much, she surrounds you. But Sarko had mastered them… ”reports another.
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"She was going to coal. Rachida, she sees people. We don't need more tech, we need policies, ”defends Eric Woerth, at the time in the Budget. Any resemblance to a campaign running in 2020 - punctuated by an impressive rate of field trips, less by the bubbling of ideas - is not completely coincidental.
She was exfiltrated from the government in 2009, and sent to Brussels as an MEP - a disgrace for her, who will hold this role until 2019. There, "she was not much involved, it's true. She only works on the subjects that fascinate her ”, explains a MEP of the time, one of her friends. It is now Paris, especially Paris, that vibrates with the adventures of Rachida Dati. Two years earlier, Nicolas Sarkozy - "his HRD! "Laughs Franck Louvrier - sent him to conquer the very bourgeois 7th arrondissement. That she easily ravishes on March 29, 2008.
"We like it because it pisses off its own"
But here too, nothing will be simple. Starting with relationships with his own political family. Didn't she flee the Parisian LR group in 2015, threatened with exclusion because she had not been paying her dues for several years? She will not return until after the departure of NKM, in 2017, with whom she was in conflict. Some accuse him of having “soaped the board” from the top of the 2014 municipal list “out of jealousy”.
But we do not tell the Parisian activity of the ex-Sarkozyst icon better than from the camp opposite. "She is very active in the seventh, but quite absent from the Paris Council, it is not her playground, says a member of the Hidalgo team. She especially distinguished herself by the spectacular mandals that she put in her own camp! We like it because it pisses off its own. ” Like a hint of admiration in the mouth of this socialist.
Dati's relations with Anne Hidalgo are on the contrary deemed to be very good. At the start of her campaign this fall, she even refused to attack her competitor by name, to the point that some in her camp wondered if the two women had a deal. "There is mutual respect for two atypical paths," sums up the Hidalgo entourage soberly. However, according to a regular at the Hôtel de Ville, it happened to the ex-minister, after a TV appearance, to split a text message to "Anne" to apologize if she had been rude: "J 'knocked, sorry'. Ditto the other way.
His specialty: vengeful texting
It will be understood, the real bullets are fired especially in the corridor of the right. "She denounces the stinking balls towards him, but she has her own factory of stinking balls", plague a former minister. "Rachida" does not hesitate to initiate the balance of power. “The political class is generally quite cowardly. She has courage. It is a twig physically, but it can attack a monster, ”raves Renaud Muselier.
The native of Saint-Rémy even has a specialty: vengeful texting. “They can be very threatening, threatening. It tires me, I don't answer and it passes, ”blows a prisoner from the right. "She likes to release fear, that's how we have power," continues a small hand of the LR group in Paris, which has long rubbed shoulders with her.
Internal tremors soothed in the last weeks
"With Ms. Dati either we must submit, or we are her enemy," recently released Philippe Goujon, outgoing mayor (LR) of the fifteenth, with whom she is in conflict. Refusing to support her at any cost in the second round - preferring to vote for "the best placed" against Hidalgo - Goujon will have an LR list in front of him on March 15. From an electoral point of view, this is incomprehensible. But the Parisian right has its reasons that reason does not have. Two other outgoing mayors (LR), Delphine Bürkli (IXth) and Florence Berthout (Ve) directly preferred to join En Marche rather than to line up behind Dati, reducing any chance for LR.
In recent weeks, however, the seismograph which measures the internal tremors on the right, however, seems to point to technical unemployment. Because there is a talent that everyone recognizes in Rachida Dati: his training capacity, an unparalleled ease once his country trainers are worn. "She's amazing ..." they all admit. What about passion - rage? - decried above becomes a subject of admiration. And intransigence to the end of the game, yesterday still fertile ground of tenacious resentment, becomes tolerable - if not praised - while not the common battle.
This will end at the end of March. A victory - (very) unexpected alignment of the electoral planets - would force Dati to prolong the concord. Otherwise, it will resume its lonely path, its life of perpetual combat. With a first cloud over the head: the investigation opened for "abuse of corporate assets" by the national financial prosecutor's office on contracts and remuneration paid by a subsidiary of Renault-Nissan for his advice as a lawyer between 2010 and 2012. A follower of noble sport, Rachida Dati is not about to put away his boxing gloves.
His strong ideas
Reduce Paris debt to 0.
"A clean Paris": reorganize, modernize tools and develop mechanization of tasks, even outsource waste collection.
Check of 1200 euros per year for three years to help Parisian families to move while staying in the capital.
Equip the capital with an armed municipal police force to combat everyday crime.
Lower municipal tariffs (canteen, elderly) without increasing taxation.
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