If Christophe Castaner turns around on his balance sheet at Beauvau, he can say that he has hardly been spared. Arrived in October 2018, after the spectacular resignation of Gérard Collomb, he was plunged into the bath without any time of adaptation. The Élysée had taken the precaution of flanking him with a Secretary of State for the Interior, Laurent Nuñez, with the profile of "technician". And the tandem has endured everything, starting with the crisis of "yellow vests".
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"We think what we want of Castaner, but rarely a minister will have had to face so many major crises in such a short time" , concedes a great prefect very familiar with security issues. While France was going to enter a sequence of unprecedented social violence, with undeclared demonstrations every Saturday, throughout the territory, the Beauvau host had to face the earthquake of the attack by the Paris police headquarters, October 3, 2019. How can we explain to the French that an institution supposed to protect them from Islamist terrorism, in particular, has been unable to detect a dangerous individual within his intelligence service?
It took a lot of humility and education to get through this ordeal. Today, the terrorist threat has not disappeared, but it is clear that France is no longer shaken by mass attacks like those of 2015 in Paris and 2016 in Nice. Castaner worked tirelessly to refine the response.
Of course, he had a few missteps, like this barely named controversial nightclub outing. This admission from the very beginning also annoyed the police: "I am firmly convinced that putting a young man in prison for a first offense is not the right solution because I believe that prison is criminogenic," said their minister on RTL.
But it also had its heyday. Wasn't he praised in August 2019 for his management of the security of the G7 in Biarritz? Six months later, the coronavirus reshuffled all the cards. The social climate has become tense again, the deconfinement has led to a new form of protest, this time turned against the police, against the backdrop of an anti-racist campaign. And the minister gave the feeling of doubting his troops, before recovering before the wind of anger.
To reduce it to its prejudices in the face of illegitimate violence and the latent racism of a very minority fringe of the big house would be caricatured. "He has learned to love this profession of emergency minister, but it is not easy to navigate between the police unions that co-manage the institution and the Elysée that spurs it on," said a senior official.
Basically, many files remain pending: the rise in drug trafficking and communitarianism which, as in Dijon, seems to have paralyzed the State; mass delinquency and urban violence which are on the rise again, after the parenthesis of the Covid. At the same time, the reform of working time among the security forces is devouring the workforce. As for uncontrolled immigration, it has become uncontrollable. How not to remain humble?
