“Rachida Dati accepted that a group presidency be appointed, she will remain a sort of honorary president. » Aurélien Véron, spokesperson for the Changer Paris group, announces the news which upsets him a little, which confirms information from Figaro. After his boss’s decision to accept the position entrusted to him by Emmanuel Macron, he believed that there was no reason for the new Minister of Culture to leave the presidency of Changer Paris, his group at the Council of Paris . Rachida Dati has after all confirmed that she was indeed a candidate for the next municipal elections of 2026. But one man will have had the skin of Rachida Dati: the ex-mayor of the 16th Francis Szpiner.
The senator is the first elected Parisian to have fired red balls when the former Minister of Justice announced the news. “In two years, when the question arises of who is the best candidate to ensure the alternation in Paris, we will see if Madame Dati’s participation in this government has become an obstacle or an asset. I think she made a political mistake,” declared Francis Szpiner on France Culture.
Catherine Dumas favorite
“The Szpiner line is marginal,” assures Aurélien Véron. A few phone calls with elected officials from the Changer Paris group confirm this. Nicolas Sarkozy’s former minister seems to enjoy the support of a very large majority of her group. “She put a group back to work, she does it consistently, at the local level, things don’t falter. And the proposals from the En Marche candidates are copied and pasted from our proposals,” confides an elected official from the same group.
“The Republicans will have their candidate, who will not be Rachida Dati,” assured Wednesday the head of the LR deputies Olivier Marleix, even mentioning the possibility of sending a “bailiff” to the Minister of Culture to notify her of her exclusion from the left. “Political life is about convictions, it’s not about personal careers. »
The presidency of the LR group could be taken over by the current senator Catherine Dumas, who is also vice-president of the group, but the name of the mayor of the 6th, Jean-Pierre Lecoq, is also circulating. If the compromise reached stopped the war opened by Francis Szpiner, several elected officials express their concern. “He has already screwed up the senatorial elections by removing Agnès Evren from the list, and now he is attacking Rachida Dati. He would like to be a candidate himself, but the vast majority of Paris councilors fear him, even hate him,” complains one councilor, who fears divisions and would like to burst the Szpiner “abscess”. The new presidency of the group should be formalized before the next Paris Council, which opens on Tuesday February 6.