Without Gérard Collomb, who died on Saturday, November 25 at the age of 76, political life would not have been the same. Because he is the elected official who propelled Emmanuel Macron to the forefront. He has never forgotten that. As evidenced by these words, spoken at the Élysée Palace on March 8, 2022. "You were a great architect of what my victory was. I know, dear Gerard, how much I owe you. On that day, the head of state took all his time to decorate the former mayor of Lyon and dine alone with him. "Gégé", as the Macron couple calls him, does not hide his emotion. The head of state was keen to dedicate this ceremony to him, almost out of time, while the war in Ukraine has just broken out and the president has gone back to campaigning for his re-election.
However, nothing predestined Gérard Collomb, born on June 20, 1947, to meet this destiny of kingmaker. He was born into a modest family: his mother was a housekeeper, his father a metal worker and CGT trade unionist. Gérard is a serious student, who knows the rise thanks to his studies. Khâgne at the Lycée du Parc, in Lyon (Rhône), then an agrégation in classics, which sealed his love of Greek and Latin.
He took his first steps in politics to the ideas of François Mitterrand. He joined its Convention of Republican Institutions, then participated in the refounding of the Socialist Party. In 1977, at the age of 30, Gérard Collomb became a Lyon city councillor. It was the beginning of a career that ticked all the boxes: six years as a member of parliament, seventeen years as a senator. He won the mayoralty of the 1995th arrondissement of Lyon in 2001 and then the central mayoralty in <>. He succeeded Raymond Barre, who did not stand for re-election.
An influential local baron
The new strongman transforms the city. A self-confessed cumulard, he only holds his position in the Senate when the issues are related to his city. This earned him a financial sanction from the upper house. He doesn't miss the national exhibition. In the Socialist Party, it is a local baron classified as a right-wing who makes and breaks internal majorities. The senator-mayor supported Ségolène Royal, then Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and finally François Hollande. In 2015, he fell in love with the young Emmanuel Macron, who had just arrived at Bercy. He invited her to the summer university of his current, the Reformers. Then, from 2016 onwards, he put his networks of elected officials, advisers and entrepreneurs at the service of the ambitions of the former deputy secretary general of the Élysée.
"Someone like Emmanuel Macron is shattering the landscape," he insisted on May 18, 2016, in front of Jean-Jacques Bourdin. According to him, it is "obvious" that the Minister of the Economy will be a candidate if François Hollande does not rise in the polls. Thunderclap on the left. The Baron evokes aloud a hypothesis that had been taboo in the Socialist Party until then... The thirty-year-old, bolstered by this support from Lyon, then set off to attack the Élysée Palace.
Lyon, 24 September 2016. Emmanuel Macron and Gérard Collomb, then mayor of Lyon. Two months later, the Minister of the Economy declared his candidacy for the presidency. AFP/Jean-Philippe Ksiazek
On the day of his colt's inauguration, Collomb could not suppress tears of joy in the banquet hall of the presidency. Emmanuel Macron quickly offered him the opportunity to become Minister of the Interior. The Lyonnais asked for 48 hours to think. In his entire career, he never sought to become a minister. Collective discipline is not his cup of tea. He prefers the role of local kinglet. But at the age of 69, he finally accepted and left, with death in his soul, his seat in Lyon, in the name of non-cumulation.
Resignation and defeat for Lyon
At Place Beauvau, he passed an anti-terrorism law, which enshrined the measures of the state of emergency in common law, and the asylum and immigration law, intended to reduce the time it took to examine asylum applications. At his post, he had to deal with the attack at the Saint-Charles train station and the terrorist attacks in Carcassonne and Trèbes. At the ministry, Collomb became disillusioned. He does not get along well with the head of government, Édouard Philippe, has to scrap with the left wing of Macron, and fears that his former deputies will take away his influence in Lyon.
Read alsoGérard Collomb revisits the story of his resignation
On 2 October 2018, he confirmed his resignation in an interview with Le Figaro, in which he announced his return to the Lyon scene. Édouard Philippe learned of this in the middle of a question session with the government, through an alert on his mobile phone. An eagerness that was for naught. Faced with dissent and worn out by his time in the executive, Gérard Collomb managed to save neither his mayoralty nor the metropolis in the 2020 elections.
Disappointed but not dejected, for a long time at odds with Emmanuel Macron, he remained an advisor to the metropolis of Lyon until the end. On September 16, 2022, he announced that he had stomach cancer. In a message, he promised: "I will fight against the disease with the same energy that I put into the service of Lyon." His last fight.