Xavier Bertrand has easy SMS.
"As soon as I quote him in a program, he sends me one, he's on the hook!
Slips a cadre of Republicans.
“On each birthday, he texts me, like Laurent Wauquiez when he was at the head of the party”, abounds another.
But since the hypothesis of a Baroin candidacy for the presidential election seems to be moving away - the mayor of Troyes is also in "advanced discussions" to take over the general management of the Morgan Stanley bank - it is rather the elected LR who send messages to the elected Picard.
“I get a lot.
We feel the Bertrand moment very well, ”rejoices the senator from Pas-de-Calais, Jean-François Rapin, who coordinates the networks of the former Minister of Health in the upper house.
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"I am more determined than ever", launches Xavier Bertrand
"Nature abhors a vacuum," observes the boss of deputies LR Damien Abad.
To hear it, the president of Hauts-de-France, who slammed the party's door in December 2017, "ticks a lot of boxes", in particular that of embodying a "social right, popular, close to the people".
"Finally, the
little fat
, the
little belayer
who jacked up with his soles in the corridors of the Assembly, we have finished making fun of him!
rejoices his traveling companion Christophe Coulon, at the head of the regional majority.
His voluntarism has taken over and the political caste is turning to him.
"
"He's the one who's most hungry"
Even the sarkozyste Rachida Dati seems under the spell: "He understood what France wanted", she recently released.
The former Minister of Justice, who herself maintains the ambiguity about his own candidacy, concedes it: it is Xavier Bertrand who, today, "is most hungry".
His diet?
It is based on a ferocious appetite and an assumed ambition.
And more prosaically composed of "two slices of ham swallowed in his van to settle down before aperitifs and not be tempted", laughs those around him.
Since he was elected regional president in 2015 against the RN, Xavier Bertrand has traveled 11,000 km per month in the "cattle truck", his black Peugeot Traveler transformed into a rolling office.
As president of a region and as a future candidate, he promises to "take care of the French" with concrete solutions and simple words.
"It is not because he has used 300 vocabulary words at most for a year that he can win…" squeaks a rival camp.
Words that deliberately slam in the public debate too, as when he mentions a “premeditated murder” after the announced closure of Bridgestone in Béthune (Pas-de-Calais).
Purchasing power bonus, car rental for two euros per day, childcare assistance for single parents… Xavier Bertrand makes his region the showcase for his action.
He knows that a re-election in Hauts-de-France is the sine qua non for any Elyos dream.
"He must win properly, without needing the votes of those he claims to be fighting after," warns LR general secretary Aurélien Pradié, referring to a possible agreement with LREM.
Strengthen the game
But Xavier Bertrand does not wait for this deadline to advance his pawns.
"He will accelerate his contradictory speech vis-à-vis Macron", slips a faithful.
His curiosity at the beginning of the quinquennium, mixed with benevolence, for a President of the Republic who had led a campaign outside the party, is well and truly over.
He hopes to widen the circle of parliamentarians, today about ten, with whom he takes the pulse of the country.
By the end of the year, his Manufacture think-tank should have a branch in each department.
Enough to strengthen your game?
"It is not a strong enough framework to develop a presidential program or a thought for the country", regrets a deputy who is nevertheless close to him.
An elected official who participated in a meeting on August 7 in Lumio (Haute-Corse) was disappointed: “There was no background, it was commercial coffee.
Xavier Bertrand can also count on his vast network of former ministerial collaborators to supply him with notes, retorts his entourage.
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Presidential 2022: the right is desperately looking for a leader
On September 30, he will meet LR boss Christian Jacob, with whom relations have not always been easy. They will discuss LR's support for the regional but also the modalities of the future process to decide between the presidential candidates. After having given up participating in the 2016 primary - the landscape was obstructed by the presence of top names such as Sarkozy, Juppé and Fillon - Xavier Bertrand now relies on his "dynamic", which remains to be confirmed in the polls, to win at the party. Bertrand, new natural candidate of the right? This would be to forget that his probable rivals, Valérie Pécresse or Bruno Retailleau, will not be erased so easily. And that in the LR ranks, his image of a bad comrade sticks to him. “When Usain Bolt runs a 100m, cuts an intimate, do you think he's looking at the other lanes? "