Faced with David Pujadas, on the set of France 2, candidate Emmanuel Macron did not budge. “A minister must leave the government when he is indicted,” he assured the presenter of the 8 p.m. news on March 2, 2017. Seven years and two presidential elections have passed since this interview. The Head of State seems to have forgotten, over the course of his two mandates, this old principle of constitutional law, also called “Bérégovoy-Balladur jurisprudence”. The president is no longer content with supporting ministers indicted by the courts during their mandate, by not forcing them to resign. From now on, he appoints to the government personalities targeted by investigations for serious acts. To clear his conscience, he uses his joker, “the presumption of innocence”.
The new Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, has been indicted since July 2021 for “corruption” and “passive influence peddling by a person vested with a public elective mandate” in the investigation into contracts established by a subsidiary of Renault-Nissan, when Carlos Ghosn was its CEO. The investigating judge is particularly interested in 900,000 euros paid to her, between 2010 and 2012, by RNBV, the Dutch subsidiary of the Renault-Nissan alliance. She was then a lawyer and Member of the European Parliament. The magistrates want to understand if his fees correspond to specific activities or if it was a job of convenience that could have masked lobbying in the European Parliament, prohibited for MEPs. Nicolas Sarkozy’s former Minister of Justice disputes these accusations.
“Indictment is not a conviction”
The name of Rachida Dati is also cited in an investigation into accusations of kidnapping, sequestration and torture of a Franco-Algerian lobbyist, which notably target the boss of PSG, Nasser Al-Khelaïfi. The town hall of the 7th arrondissement of Paris, which she has headed since 2008, was searched in this case on June 6, 2023.
The new Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, sees no problem in this embarrassing appointment. “Indictment is not a conviction,” he declared on TF1. This does not mean guilt. » It seems far away, the time when François Bayrou resigned, just one month after being appointed Keeper of the Seals, because Modem was the target of a preliminary investigation into the employment of its European parliamentary assistants. The time when François de Rugy, then Minister of Ecological Transition, left the government a few days after the publication of several Mediapart surveys. Without having been indicted.
“A salutary pretext”
Emmanuel Macron has definitively distanced himself from this doctrine. Dussopt, Darmanin, Dupond-Moretti… The head of state has stepped up several times to defend his ministers who are in trouble with the law. As in July 2020, when he supported his Minister of the Interior, targeted by a rape complaint, by posing as a “guarantor of [la] presumption of innocence “. “Emmanuel Macron has no ideology, it’s pragmatic. However, over his two mandates, he beat the number of ministers implicated in legal proceedings. At a given moment, this doctrine concerning the indictment of ministers became troublesome in his practice of the exercise of power, because there were too many! There is the idea that he cannot govern if he applies this rule too rigidly,” analyzes lawyer Jérôme Karsenti.
Specializing in the fight against corruption, the Parisian criminal lawyer observes that “the presumption of innocence becomes a salutary pretext to avoid drawing political consequences from legal indictments”. The presumption of innocence, he recalls, “allows a citizen to defend himself from the accusations brought against him and to assert the rights that the code of criminal procedure grants to any accused”. “It’s not a shield,” he insists. Even if he remains presumed innocent, an indicted minister should, according to him, resign because this judicial measure “affects the appearance of probity, honesty, exemplarity” specific to this function. “This destroys the image of politics and therefore the image of politics and democracy. And that, in reality, is what Emmanuel Macron has just trampled on. »