It's a book that prompts you to step on the brake pedal and peek in the rearview mirror.
Oh, we do not climb in a time machine for a journey through the centuries, just an immersion in the heart of the National Assembly and yet it is quite exotic.
It was less than four years ago, a thousand years at the rate of the current pandemic but also of the crisis of the yellow vests, the Benalla affair or the protest of the pension reform which shook the quinquennium.
READ ALSO -
LREM: facing the executive, the deputies tempted by emancipation
The Covid does not exist, the controversy over the absence of masks to protect the French from the virus or the hiccups of vaccination either.
We are on June 19, 2017, the day after the second round of legislative elections.
The times are calm, almost benevolent.
Out of 577 elected officials, 315 came from a movement unknown a few months earlier, the Republic on the move (LREM), most of them never held an elective mandate.
An unprecedented renewal under the Fifth Republic.
These members, overflowing with enthusiasm, a little overwhelmed by decorum, poured into the bays of the Hemicycle with their Mac Book Air slung over their shoulder.
They want to be transparent and exemplary.
READ ALSO -
Where are the 44 deputies lost by LREM in three years?
Ambassadors of a new world, they are young, idealists, energetic - women are more numerous there -, conquerors, want to re-enchant the world.
They do not have the codes of political life, kiss each other like good bread in the Hemicycle, take selfies, bring their bottle of Evian water and their club sandwich in session as they did in the start -up in which many of them worked.
To avoid the amateurish lawsuits which quickly emerge, neophytes are quickly forced to submit to the rituals of the Republic.
What does it matter!
Everything must change.
Everything will change...
No training to become a deputy
“
We set foot on the ground of the National Assembly for the first time after the second round of legislative elections.
We wanted to bear witness to the daily life of this new generation of deputies, whose amateurism, sometimes incompetence and risky interventions on television were very quickly noticed by the media,
”observes Wally Bordas, journalist at Le Figaro Étudiant, author of the book published on January 21 with Nejma Brahim, journalist at Médiapart.
Novice parliamentarians who realize that it is not so simple to fabricate the law, to draft an amendment, to ask a question to the government, there is no training to become a good deputy.
"
We really didn't know anything, we didn't understand anything, we had to be in three places at the same time, go to committee, recruit our teams
" confides Cédric Villani, deputy for Essonne today excluded from the movement.
In ambush, the old world deemed disconnected from the French is resisting better than expected.
Marine Le Pen like Jean-Luc Mélenchon gaze at the newcomers without ever greeting them.
A bloated group that divides
Wally Bordas, one of the authors of
Tout ça pour ça.
Sebastien soriano
The interest of the book is that the authors - of the same generation as the deputies - are not familiar with the political seraglio either.
Curious observers, neither jaded nor cynical, with a light sole, they follow in the footsteps of these first deputies.
They discover with them the studio offices in which the elected representatives of the Province work and sleep, learn that the mysteries of political life are emerging in the surrounding restaurants.
And, a little stunned are also witnesses of the flaws of this plethoric group which quickly tore itself apart and failed to restore the confidence of the French with national representation.
The book is overflowing with crisp anecdotes and disenchanted secrets.
He describes elected officials who are poor speakers but also bad managers.
The turnover of their parliamentary assistants has never been higher in the history of the Assembly: after 6 months in office, 200 of them have been dismissed.
It also sheds the spotlight on the rapid existential crisis of elected officials who have sometimes left great careers and are overwhelmed by a feeling of emptiness.
Ironically qualified as elected "
Playmobil
" by the opposition because they vote as one man all the texts, they are enraged.
“
I don't want to be the Chinese restaurant cat to lift my paw.
I do not serve anything
”gets angry Valérie Petit, MP for the North who wanted to be a force for proposals on a daily basis and has since left the group.
READ ALSO
- At the Assembly, the LREM group records a 40th start in three years
Faster than they thought, the two authors will discover the hiccups, the hard knocks, the casting errors but also the tears, the betrayals and the explosion of the group.
The star up nation seizes up, gets bogged down.
The deputies suffer badly from undergoing the rule of the executive but not sufficiently anchored in their constituency, they do not manage to be a relay of weight between deep France and the government.
Demotivated, they tear each other apart.
The group explodes.
“
No less than 30% of the deputies we interviewed had left the LREM group in spring 2020
” write the authors.
“
We had set foot on the ground of the National Assembly for the first time the day after the second round of legislative elections.
We wanted to bear witness to the daily life of this generation of deputies, whose amateurism, sometimes incompetence and hazardous appearances on television were quickly noticed by the media.
We are telling the story of an unfulfilled promise,
”observes Wally Bordas who, over the months, has realized that the perilous political adventure of these elected officials has often had the better of their personal lives.
“
Love stories were shattered.
In the first year of the legislature alone, 26 divorce proceedings had been initiated.
It continued at the same pace then making this legislature the one where the greatest number of couples exploded, ”he
confides.
All that for that ...
All that for that, they wanted to change everything, they failed
, Wally Bordas and Nejma Brahim at Plon editions.
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/UQQAU7OV6RA6HGJD6NM2HD2PEE.jpg)
