May 6, 2012. The lights go out at Mutuality in Paris, where Nicolas Sarkozy has just acknowledged his defeat against François Hollande.
The right does not know it yet, but it will not return to power for at least ten years.
Among the few personalities still hanging out in the room, Xavier Bertrand slips to a handful of journalists, about the defeated candidate: “Him and me, it's over.
Now I'm rolling for my apple.
Fed up with paying for the mistakes of others.
"
Freeing oneself from Sarkozy and taking over did not therefore wait, as this scene reveals, told by our colleague Olivier Beaumont in “The capital sins of politics” (Flammarion).
Four years later, however, the ambitious, who became president of Hauts-de-France, will not run for the primary of the right while the so-called retiree from politics, across his path, will break. teeth from the first turn.
Bitterness and return to square one.
Today, the one who has become the best hope of the right and the one who is his best memory agreed to see each other regularly in the office of the former president.
Meetings that have no dubbing value, take care to specify the rue de Miromesnil.
If the former head of state pushes him into battle, he does not support him.
But on both sides, we are promoting peaceful exchanges.
"We feel that Xavier is trying to copy the ingredients of the success of 2007: the call to rally, the popular fiber", we smile in the Sarkozy team.
It must be said that that year, Nicolas Sarkozy had made Chiraquien Xavier Bertrand his campaign spokesperson, alongside Rachida Dati.
"Xavier was really the darling"
Before propelling him Minister of Labor, and even member of the "G7", a small circle of favorite ministers of the president.
“In 2007-2008, Xavier was really the darling.
He was considered the best minister in his government.
This is why Sarkozy put him at the head of the UMP
(Editor's note: as secretary general in 2008),
”slips someone close to Picard.
“He considered him a good minister.
But everyone quickly understood that he was a bad friend ”, nuance Brice Hortefeux who, like many sarkozysts, has never had his card at Xavier Bertrand's fan club.
"Sarkozy had great confidence in his professional abilities but found that he lacked scope," recalls a pillar of the Elysee Palace at the time.
Over the five-year term, Jean-François Cope takes up more space and Xavier Bertrand ends up on the sidelines during the 2012 campaign. The two beasts blame each other for a lack of mutual recognition and are explained in January 2014 in a restaurant.
The old darling tells him his four truths and warns: "I will never be your minister again."
"" I had lunch with the frog and I was the ox ", laughs Nicolas Sarkozy.
In December 2014 Nicolas Sarkozy, new president of the UMP, in the hall of the party's headquarters, after an interview with Xavier Bertrand./LP / OLIVIER CORSAN
Contemptuous?
"Sarkozy has always remained with the reasons for which he took him as spokesperson in 2007: for him, Bertrand is everyone, the portly provincial insurer that Cecilia had advised him.
He found it exotic to have everyone.
But he is wrong, "argues a very good connoisseur of the two men according to which" Bertrand has had no illusions from the start about their relationship. "
When, in 2014, Xavier Bertrand was questioned at the microphone of Europe 1 on an avalanche of disdainful words that Nicolas Sarkozy would have made about him, he does not pretend not to believe in them: "These nasty, cruel, murderous sentences, is capable of it.
"And to assent:" By dint of criticizing everyone like that, a question arises: who is what he loves, apart from him?
"
"He always takes him for a baltringue!"
Relations deteriorated further the following year.
"In 2015, it was terrible when Xavier Bertrand refused the arrival of Sarkozy in the between-rounds of the regional to support him against Marine Le Pen", recalls a friend of the Northerner.
Worse, Xavier Bertrand launches an injunction aimed at the leaders of the UMP, Sarkozy in the lead, which will remain long in the throat of the latter: "Leave us alone!"
Let them be silent!
"It was the time when the former Minister of Labor even regretted having been the boss's" darling "for a while:" It spoiled what made me original: my background and my origins.
"
Today, the Bertrand team prefers to draw parallels between the two men.
"They have several points in common: nothing has ever been given to them, they have a great capacity for work, an iron determination, an innate political sense, they do not come from the technostructure, the people look at them differently", unrolls a close to Saint-Quentinois.
“Bertrand thinks he has Sarko in his pocket.
But he still takes him for a baltringue!
», Laughs a sarkozyst.
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“We are not in the seraglio so we face more adversity. We said it again the other day, "reacts Xavier Bertrand for whom the biggest difference between him and Sarkozy would now be that he is not ... a big fan of Cavani, the ex-Uruguayan striker. of the PSG. Whoever believed, a few years ago, that the policy led by Sarkozy was not "up to par" now assures that the former president "remains a benchmark". Xavier Bertrand also remembers a sentence that Nicolas Sarkozy would have told him in 2007: “You are the one who resembles me the most… not physically. At least you're not a robot. A mirror of the former president? More than ever, Xavier Bertrand would like to believe in it, and not just by shaving.
