Death of Marielle de Sarnez: "Our sorrow is immense", cries François Bayrou

“Here is the extra day.

Marielle, so talented and so courageous, has just left.

Our grief is immense, ”reacted on Twitter this Wednesday evening, the centrist leader François Bayrou, to the death of Marielle de Sarnez, at the age of 69 years.

The political life of Marielle de Sarnez will have merged with that of François Bayrou.

For better, like the 2007 presidential campaign, and for worse, the legal affair of parliamentary assistants which cost them both their ephemeral ministerial chairs in June 2017.

This status of eternal right-hand man of the centrist leader, of "Machiavelli of the Modem" or of cerberus blocking access to the "boss" will have earned him, in the ranks of elected officials from the center and the right, a fearful respect as strong enmities and resentments.

However, assures a relative, this authoritarian and sometimes brittle woman, sharp silhouette with the eternal combination of jeans white T-Shirt and dark Armani jacket, "liked the confrontation but not the castagne, sought even the benevolence in politics".

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Between Marielle de Sarnez and François Bayrou, the story of a fusional duo

With the peasant and Béarnese roots of Bayrou, she contrasts her origins as a girl from a good family born in Paris 8th, with a Gaullist deputy father, a path of spoiled child a bit rebellious who stops his studies after the bac, tries various odd jobs before getting involved in politics as the little hand of Giscard's campaign in the 1974 presidential election. Politics will never leave her: active within the Giscardian Youth, she participated in the creation of the UDF - ancestor of the MoDem - in 1978, collaborates with centrist figures like Simone Veil or Raymond Barre before taking part, in 1989, in the organization of the States General of the opposition.

It is in this forum dedicated to reconciling the centrist and Gaullist families of the RPR with a view to the legislative elections of 1993 that she will meet François Bayrou, a rising and moving star of the UDF.

"Cash but fair"

The duo quickly becomes inseparable.

When Bayrou was appointed Minister (Education) in 1993 in Edouard Balladur's cohabitation government, she followed him as advisor and then chief of staff.

This is where she adopts a role, and a style, which she will keep until the end.

"Cigarettes on their lips, often with their feet on the desk, they were omnipresent, we had the impression that they controlled the brain of François who begged his approval for a yes or a no," recalls a collaborator of the Bayrou cabinet.

His way of overprotecting him, cutting him off from others, caused the estrangement of tenors like Jean-Louis Borloo, Gérard Longuet or Claude Goasguen, ”she adds with a touch of bitterness.

"She was cash but fair, always ready to receive the criticisms that some did not dare to address to the boss", remembers the communicator Régis Lefebvre, close to the duo.

So much so that he was given the responsibility for radical, even “suicidal” choices: support for Ségolène Royal in 2007 and then for François Hollande in 2012… when it was Bayrou's strategy and his alone!

"An exceptional strength"

After giving up the fight in the last municipal elections, she turned to her family, “her children of whom she was so proud, Justine the writer winner of the Renaudot Essays Prize, and Augustin the head of NGOs on the ground in Lebanon, in Syria, testifies Régis Lefebvre.

She had bought a small house on a Greek island, where she loved to relax with the family.

"

It was there that the disease, leukemia, surprised her last summer.

“She fought with infinite courage, confides with sadness Patrick Mignola, boss of the MoDem group to the Assembly.

She was due to have a transplant last month, but it didn't work.

The last memory I have of her is when she called me just before I returned to the hospital on December 22.

She was strong, always strong, because Marielle was an exceptional strength.

And this final phone call reflects his personality and his struggles ”.