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Marielle de Sarnez

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Marielle de Sarnez
Member of the National Assembly
for Paris's 11th constituency
In office
21 June 2017 – 13 January 2021
Preceded byPascal Cherki
Succeeded byMaud Gatel
Minister for European Affairs
In office
17 May 2017 – 19 June 2017
Prime MinisterÉdouard Philippe
Preceded byHarlem Désir
Succeeded byNathalie Loiseau
Member of the European Parliament
In office
20 July 1999 – 17 May 2017
ConstituencyÎle-de-France
Personal details
Born(1951-03-27)27 March 1951
Paris, France
Died13 January 2021(2021-01-13) (aged 69)
Paris, France
Political party

Marielle de Sarnez (Template:IPA-fr; 27 March 1951 – 13 January 2021) was a French politician of the centrist Democratic Movement party (MoDem). She was a member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2017, when she became Minister for European Affairs in the government of Prime Minister Édouard Philippe in May 2017. She resigned after a month due to a scandal involving alleged payment for work she didn't do, but was elected a few days later to represent the Paris 11th constituency in the National Assembly on the center-right La République En Marche! slate. She was a committed Europeanist as well as centrist, pushing MoDem to resist currents on each end of the political spectrum. She was a longtime collaborator of MoDem President and three-time candidate for the French Presidency, François Bayrou.

Early life

Marielle de Sarnez was born in the 8th arrondissement of Paris on 27 March 1951 and grew up in an aristocratic family intimately tied to the French political establishment. From 1961 to 1967, her Gaullist father Olivier de Sarnez, who had been in the French Resistance, was chief of staff to Roger Frey, Interior Minister, and her mother was responsible for floral arrangements at the Élysée Palace. Nevertheless the young de Sarnez was swept up in the May 1968 protests while still a high school student, kicked out of Lycée Sainte-Marie de Passy Catholic girls school and participating in the occupation of neighboring boys school Lycée Jean-Baptiste Say. (Her father was elected to the Deputy to the National Assembly on the Gaullist conservative Union of Democrats for the Republic—UDR—ticket a month later.) After earning her baccalaureate from Lycée La Fontaine, de Sarnez next struck out on her own, preferring working in retail to continuing her studies.

Career

Early career

By 1973, the political world came calling, and Ladislas Wroblewski, who cofounded the Independent Republicans (RI) party with Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, offered her a part-time role as secretary of the Young RI arm. Here she met contemporaries Young Giscardians who became major figures—Jean-Pierre Raffarin who went on to become Prime Minister, Dominique Bussereau who became president of the Assembly of the Departments of France [fr], and eventual Minister of Justice Pascal Clément. Giscard d'Estaing was elected President the next year and de Sarnez rose quickly through the ranks. The movement and her place in it initially felt modern to de Sarnez, but she was disappointed by the rightward turn, especially the anti-abortion politics, taken by the new Administration, and wished Giscard d'Estaing had taken the opportunity to break from the right-wing UDR (predecessor to the Rally for the Republic, RPR) and form a majority government without them—failure to do so, she later said, left the Giscardians "hostages" to the right. Together with de Sarnez's early dedication to the European cause, Simone Veil took notice and offered her a slot on her list for the European elections in 1979 (when Veil, renown French political figure and abortion rights advocate, became President of the European Parliament). De Sarnez, who had a ten-month-old daughter and a son on the way, declined at that time, later saying she was glad to have waited for a more compatible political partner.

Giscard d'Estaing was defeated in the 1981 French presidential election and while this was a personal setback to de Sarnez’s career, she said later she was not entirely regretful about the political changes brought by President François Mitterrand, of the Socialist Party (PS).

Work with François Bayrou

Facing the evolving post-'68 political landscape, in 1978 de Sarnez was a cofounder of the Union for French Democracy (UDF), aimed at developing a center-right coalition to back Giscard d'Estaing and provide a counterweight to the Gaullist right. From 1986 to 1989, she served as special advisor to the chair of the UDF group in the National Assembly, Jean-Claude Gaudin.

In this milieu she met François Bayrou, with whom she worked closely for the next 40 years, despite their outward differences—her Parisian aristocratic background and lack of formal higher education contrasting with his academic credentials (Bayrou is agrégée in letters), earned in the Catholic provinces. The two became close working on Raymond Barre's campaign for President in 1988 and were soon inseparable. As his political star rose, they worked hand in glove—"Elle, c'est moi, et moi, c'est elle" ("I'm her and she is me") he told those who occasionally tried to drive a wedge between them. When Bayrou became Secretary General of the UDF in 1989, she joined him as his deputy, then likewise at the Ministry of National Education (1993 to 1997) in the government of Alain Juppé. Initially she was an adviser, but then became Director of his Private Office, the first French woman to hold such a senior role without a degree from the École nationale d'administration, the exclusive training ground for high-level government officials. From 1997 to 1998, she was the secretary-general of the UDF group in the National Assembly. After the Plural Left won the 1997 legislative elections, in 1989 through 1993 de Sarnez became Secretary-General of the opposition general assembly, while Bayrou was President of UDF. She went on to become national secretary of the UDF, from 2003 to 2007.

De Sarnez, who earned a reputation as an outstanding organizer—Raffarin described her as a "gifted politician"—also served as campaign manager for Bayrou's 2002, 2007 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Each time, Bayrou, a center-right candidate running under the UDF banner, failed to advance to the second (final) round. In 2002, they earned 6.84% of the first-round vote, a fourth-place finish while the neo-Gaullist right-wing (RPR) and extreme-right (National Front, FN) candidates Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen, respectively, advanced, and along with much of the political establishment, Bayrou threw his support behind Chirac. In 2007, it was 18.57% (Nicolas Sarkozy, a right-wing candidate then running with the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) and Socialist Party (PS) candidate Ségolène Royal advanced) and 9.13% in 2012 (Sarkozy and PS candidate François Hollande advanced). The 2007 election loss nevertheless marked a significant turning point, as Bayrou announced publicly he would not vote for Sarkozy, breaking from the dominant right-wing UMP to form the centrist Democratic Movement (MoDem). While this finally achieved de Sarnez's long-sought from freedom for their centrist movement, removing it from the thumb of the dominant right, this came at a high price. The UMP's successor the Republicans (LR) blamed Bayrou (and retaliated) for Sarkozy's loss and a number of UDF members split to create the New Centre party to support Sarkozy, leaving only three MoDem deputies in the National Assembly, including Bayrou, not enough to form their own group in the legislature. Ex-comrades accused de Sarnez, seen as Bayrou's keeper, of having creating a vacuum around Bayrou—a 2007 profile in Le Monde describes de Sarnez's role with Bayrou: "Nothing is done without her consent."

In the 2016 presidential primary held by LR, de Sarnez endorsed Alain Juppé over Sarkozy, but both lost in a surprise upset by François Fillon. Bayrou, in consultation with de Sarnez, decided not to run in the 2017 French presidential election and they both instead supported Emmanuel Macron of La République En Marche! as an alternative centrist candidate, ultimately successful.

Role in Europe

While she made her name as "the woman who made Bayrou", he also encouraged her to strike out as a candidate herself, insisting, "She's not a number two. She's a number one." Devoted to the cause of a unified Europe, she began her elected career in 1999 as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Île-de-France, heading the UDF list in 2004 and serving until 2017. A member of the UDF before 2008 and MoDem after 2008, de Sarnez served as vice-chair of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, and sat on the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education. She was in the forefront for Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and it inspired the choice to make orange the signature color of MoDem. She also took a particular interest in the EU's Erasmus Mundus, expanding on the popular Erasmus program (an acronym for "European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students", which allowed EU students to enroll in higher education programs anywhere in Europe) to create opportunities for students outside Europe to study in its universities as well.In the contentious 2005 French referendum [fr] on ratifying the European Constitution, de Sarnez was a supporter, and even though the measure failed, reveled in the "democratic moment" of the entire nation reading and debating the finer points of the dense political text. In 2009, she published a short book called Petit dictionnaire pour faire aimer l'Europe—A Brief Dictionary for Loving Europe covers 80-odd subjects in 250 pages, appealing to a vision of Europe that centers equity in its relationship with the rest of the world.

De Sarnez was also substitute for the Committee on Foreign Affairs, a member of the delegation for relations with South Africa and a substitute for the delegation to the EU–Chile Joint Parliamentary Committee. In 2016, she served as the parliament's rapporteur on a plan to lend Tunisia €500 million on favourable terms to help it reduce its external debt and consolidate its democratic mechanisms. In addition to her committee assignments, de Sarnez was a member of the European Parliament Intergroup on Children's Rights.

In May 2017, de Sarnez left the European Parliament when she was appointed French Minister for European Affairs. However scandal shortly followed, via reporting from Le Canard enchaîné that de Sarnez had been paid for work she had not actually done, embroiling her and Bayrou in a fictitious jobs scandal. Prosecutors opened an investigation into whether assistants to de Sarnez as an MEP had actually been paid for work done for the MoDem party in Paris. Both she and Bayrou (the new Minister of Justice) resigned, just before the 2017 legislative election in which de Sarnez was a candidate with Emmanuel Macron's newly formed party, La République En Marche! Prime Minister Édouard Philippe announcing that Bayrou would not be a part of the government. On 21 June 2017, Nathalie Loiseau succeeded de Sarnez as the minister for European affairs.

Representative of Paris

De Sarnez during her first week in the National Assembly in 2017

Despite the timing of the scandal, De Sarnez, who was also a Councillor (joint RPR-UDF slate) for the 14th arrondissement of Paris from 2001 to 2010 and from 2014 to 2020, was elected Deputy to the National Assembly for the 11th constituency of Paris on 18 June 2017. She became chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, serving in that capacity from 2017 to 2021. On 31 May 2019, she led a delegation of the committee on a visit to the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and the Syrian Democratic Council in Ayn Issa. After de Sarnez’s death in 2021, she was succeeded as deputy by Maud Gatel.

Personal life

De Sarnez married (later divorced) another Young Giscardian Philippe Augier (later Mayor of Deauville) and had two children, circa 1979. She separated from Augier in 1988. A private person, de Sarnez kept a small circle of friends and strictly enforced her preference that her personal life stay out of the media spotlight. Media coverage did often remark on her "uniform" of jeans and Converse sneakers.

De Sarnez died of leukemia in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris on 13 January 2021, at age 69. French leaders across the political spectrum sent public messages mourning her death, including President Macron and his rivals in the 2017 election, extreme-right FN candidate Marine Le Pen and hard left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon; as well as current Prime Minister Jean Castex and de Sarnez's longtime professional partner Bayrou. The National Assembly observed a minute of silence and Le Monde wrote, "One of the pillars of the house of centrism has fallen."

Works

  • Sarnez, Marielle de (2009). Petit dictionnaire pour aimer l'Europe (in French). Paris: B. Grasset. ISBN 978-2-246-75491-6.

References

  1. ^ "La députée et ancienne ministre Marielle de Sarnez est décédée". Le Point (in French). 13 January 2021. Retrieved 14 January 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  2. ^ Roger, Patrick (13 January 2021). "Marielle de Sarnez, figure incontournable du courant centriste, est morte". Le Monde (in French). Retrieved 14 January 2021.
  3. ^ Fontaine, Caroline (8 March 2007). "Marielle de Sarnez, celle qui a fait Bayrou". Paris Match (in French). No. 3016. Retrieved 14 January 2021.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  4. ^ "Death of Marielle de Sarnez - Communiqué from the French Presidency (Elysée Palace, 14 Jan. 2021)". France Diplomacy - Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs. Retrieved 14 January 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  5. ^ Roger, Patrick (27 February 2007). "Marielle de Sarnez la particule élémentaire des centristes". Le Monde (in French). Retrieved 15 January 2021.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  6. ^ Fitoussi, Michèle (14 January 2021). "Marielle de Sarnez : la belle au Centre". Elle (in French). Retrieved 15 January 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  7. ^ "CVs of MEPs – 7th legislative term". www.asktheeu.org. European Parliament. 18 May 2016. Retrieved 16 January 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  8. ^ Ollivier, Enora (22 February 2017). "Les trois présidentielles de François Bayrou". Le Monde (in French). Retrieved 15 January 2021.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  9. Ludovic Vigogne (20 April 2016), Bataillons: Primaire à droite: la liste des premiers soutiens parlementaires L'Opinion.
  10. "6ème législature | Marielle DE SARNEZ | Députés | Parlement européen". www.europarl.europa.eu (in French). Retrieved 15 January 2021.
  11. "Interview news: MEP Marielle De Sarnez is confident that Erasmus Mundus will be a success story". EURACTIV. 12 December 2003. Retrieved 16 January 2021.
  12. Roger, Patrick (15 May 2009). ""Petit dictionnaire pour faire aimer l'Europe", de Marielle de Sarnez, une euro-enthousiaste". Le Monde.fr (in French). Retrieved 16 January 2021.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  13. MEPs approve €500m in fresh EU loans to Tunisia European Parliament, press release of 8 June 2016.
  14. Members of the European Parliament Intergroup on Children's Rights European Parliament.
  15. Factbox: Ministers in new French government Reuters, 17 May 2017.
  16. "L'ex-secrétaire de François Bayrou citée dans l'affaire MoDem". Marianne (in French). 13 June 2017. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
  17. Briançon, Pierre (20 June 2017). "Ethics probes hijack Macron's 'moralizing' presidency". POLITICO. Retrieved 15 January 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  18. ^ "Tributes pour in for French centrist MP Mareille de Sarnez". RFI. 14 January 2021. Retrieved 14 January 2021.
  19. Boichot, Loris (21 June 2017). "François Bayrou et Marielle de Sarnez quittent le gouvernement". Le Figaro (in French). ISSN 0182-5852. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
  20. "DIRECT. La ministre des Affaires européennes, Marielle de Sarnez, quitte le gouvernement, dans la foulée du départ de François Bayrou". Franceinfo (in French). 21 June 2017. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
  21. Paolini, Esther (21 June 2017). "Nathalie Loiseau, de l'ENA aux Affaires européennes". Le Figaro. Retrieved 22 June 2017.
  22. Express. "Résultats des élections législatives 2017 Paris - 11ème circonscription". Retrieved 18 February 2019.
  23. "French delegation reveals its purpose to visit AA's areas". Hawar News Agency. 1 June 2019.
  24. Louvet, Simon (14 January 2021). "Mort de Marielle de Sarnez : Maud Gatel devient députée de Paris". actuParis (in French). Retrieved 14 January 2021.
  25. "L'Assemblée nationale observe une minute de silence en hommage à Marielle de Sarnez". MSN. 13 January 2021. Retrieved 15 January 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

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