Lille (AFP)

Gérald Darmanin, elected Saturday mayor of Tourcoing (North), will combine "for a time" this function with his ministerial portfolio with the blessing, he says, of the Macron-Philippe duo and now intends to "weigh more on the choices" for the country.

"The President of the Republic and the Prime Minister had authorized me to be minister and candidate. They authorized me, for a time and considering the exceptional circumstances" linked to the epidemic of Covid-19, "to exercise these two functions, "said the Minister of Action and Public Accounts in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche. "But without accumulating remuneration: I will not receive the mayor's allowance", donated to the Society for the Protection of Animals.

Exit the jurisprudence established by Lionel Jospin in 1997 which wants that a minister cannot direct a local executive. Admittedly, this is an unwritten rule - which has suffered exceptions, on the left as on the right (Le Drian, Sarkozy ...) - but the Prime Minister had hammered it in September 2019.

Aged 37, the Minister of Action and Public Accounts was unsurprisingly elected mayor on Saturday morning by the city council of the second largest city in the North (100,000 inhabitants) behind Lille. His list had won hands down in the first round, March 15, with 60.9% of the vote, against a background of record abstention (74.6%).

Gérald Darmanin finds the seat occupied between March 2014, when the young elected official then stamped UMP had robbed the city of the PS, and September 2017. Upon entering government, the minister, now LREM, had already waited four months before giving up his chair to a faithful and become first assistant.

Unlike his colleague Franck Riester (Culture) and Edouard Philippe, launched into the battle by announcing that they would not be mayors, Mr. Darmanin had displayed color from his candidacy. "If I am at the top of the list, it is to be mayor," he warned in late January in La Voix du Nord.

According to a government source, he will not be able to accumulate indefinitely: "he had the green light until the reshuffle", which could occur in July or September. "It is not healthy to combine the two over time," admits the person.

Certainly, he "will do what the president (him) says to do", as he says in the JDD, but not sure that the temptation of Tourcoing prevails over his national ambitions. Because if he dodges the question of a change of portfolio - we said he was tempted by a large Social Affairs style ministry with an enlarged perimeter - "the grandson of immigrants" and "the son of a cleaning lady" means well " weigh more "on political choices and" continue working "with Emmanuel Macron" to repair our country ".

"My engagement with the President of the Republic remains and will remain whole, whatever my functions within the government or outside," he proclaims.

- Candidate for Matignon? -

If he does not "believe a word" of possible Macron-Philippe tensions, there is little said about the head of government. "It is a chance to work in confidence with Edouard Philippe, who is a great Prime Minister", he says soberly, stressing in passing twice to have been "elected in the first round" of the municipal elections where the Prime Minister must face a delicate second round on June 28 in Le Havre.

In fact, his interview at the JDD can be read as a service offer for Matignon.

Claiming to be "social Gaullism" and confident that he had voted for Jean-Pierre Chevènement in the first round of the presidential election in 2002, a point in common with Emmanuel Macron, Gérald Darmanin boasts "a third way" between "unbridled capitalism and the administered economy ", pleads for" a generalization of employee share ownership "and calls for" carrying out a policy for the people ".

"There is nothing we can do without the people," insists the man who voted "no" in the 2005 referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty.

Promotion to come or not, the Head of State has indeed decided to keep by his side one of the rare heavyweights of his team, which must, faced with the economic and financial crisis linked to the Covid-19, complete the key text of the amending finance bill, debated at the end of June in Parliament.

Sunday, the mayor-minister continues his very political sequence of the Ascension weekend by participating in the Grand Jury RTL-Le Figaro-LCI before meeting in small committee political editorialists. A way to regain visibility when he seemed to disappear from the radars during the confinement, overshadowed by the real boss of Bercy, Bruno Le Maire.

On social networks, critics flared Saturday on "the absence of barrier gestures and the low wearing of masks" during the city council in Tourcoing.

© 2020 AFP