"Do we still have a lot of Covid questions?" worries Olivier Véran. Because I have a lot of other things to say. I hope we will have time… ”. The scene takes place on Sunday, June 6, during the commercial break of the program BFM Politique. Guest of the Sunday meeting of the info channel, in partnership with Le Parisien - Today in France, the Minister of Health stamps his feet on his chair, between annoyance and impatience. He has already been answering current questions for almost half an hour, once again linked to the Covid-19 crisis: the evolution of the Indian variant in France, the update on vaccines, the health pass. A necessity which does not prevent some frustrations ...
Propelled avenue de Ségur in February 2020, to replace at short notice Agnès Buzyn then launched in the municipal battle in Paris, Olivier Véran carried for sixteen months the charge of his function in the face of an extraordinary storm.
“The crisis has revealed it.
And he revealed himself in the crisis ", sums up, in a laudatory tone, a support of President Emmanuel Macron, while pointing today to the other side of the coin:" We identify him so much as minister of the Covid that his risk is to wear
this label
ad vitam aeternam
”.
He "plays his survival", judges an elected official close to the president
The person concerned is also well aware of it: “I returned, in spite of myself, but it is thus, in the daily life of the French for a long time.
I am not trying to erase this image of the minister in the crisis, that would be illusory and unnecessary.
But I would also like to show something else, especially on everyday subjects, ”he confides, regretting that his initiatives in favor of solidarity (his other ministerial hat) have often been crushed by the agenda of the health crisis.
"His subject now, if he wants to count for the future, is to recall that he also has political surface on many other themes", summarizes a parliamentarian LREM.
"Véran plays his survival", goes there more directly an elected official close to the Head of State.
So, eleven months before the 2022 presidential election, the former PS deputy of François Hollande's five-year term intends to contradict those who would like to lock him up in a box. In his office on the seventh floor of the ministry, the agenda is no less full than before: “I went from days composed of 200% by Covid, to days composed of 100% by Covid. Result, it leaves me 100% to do something else… ”, pleads the minister, whose official apartment is located… barely forty meters away, on the same floor.
More practical, to hear him, to manage ultra-busy weeks of work, whose only moments of respite that he says he allows himself are a weekly boxing session and a little piano.
"When I have ten minutes to lose, I am currently working on
Consolations
(
Editor's note, by Franz Liszt
), on my keyboard," he slips.
"Olivier is a minesweeper"
This is because the subjects that he will have to cover in the coming weeks are as numerous as they are heavy: soon the results of the first year of Ségur de la santé - with its 19 billion investment -, the passage in third reading of the bioethics law which began this week in the Assembly, and above all a social agenda which could very quickly put it back on the forefront of the news with the old age law and its corollary, the funding of pensions.
Read alsoThe old age bill on the rails this summer?
“Olivier is a deminer. We will rely on its notoriety to pass the last sensitive texts, ”decrypts a strategist from Macronie. “We have to work until the last mile,” notes the good student of the majority, sometimes annoyed that social issues are eclipsed from the debate by security and immigration. What he intends to rectify in the coming weeks.
First, by defending the balance sheet of the majority on this subject which he refuses to grant the monopoly to the left.
“On a purely political level, the popular categories can not suffer that Ms. Hidalgo and Mr. Jadot agree to know who will be the candidate of the left.
We have carried out deep social reforms, the French know that we are there, ”charges the former socialist, honing his arguments for the presidential election.
“Macron will need to fill up with votes on the left, to reassure the mayors on the left.
Olivier will be his bridgehead ”, supports a communicator of the majority.
In short, Olivier Véran intends to remain essential to weigh until the end of the mandate.
And even beyond.