Laurent Wauquiez is the president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region. He has been subject to a media diet, which pushed him to comment only once on the hotly contested pension reform.
He wants to set the record straight: he was not absent but immersed with firefighters, emergency doctors or prison guards. "We are in a country where decadence is accelerating considerably," says the one who quotes Michel Houellebecq, speaking of "fall" and "disintegration"