PARIS — Bruno Le Maire’s comeback to French politics lasted under 14 hours. But that was enough time to spark fury across the political spectrum and make him the ideal scapegoat for France’s new government crisis. 

After leaving politics last year, the man who led France’s economy and finance ministry for seven years made a surprise return on Sunday evening, when he was named armed forces minister in Sébastien Lecornu’s short-lived executive. 

But Le Maire didn’t even have a chance to enter the Hôtel de Brienne, the HQ of the defense ministry.

His appointment immediately unleashed outrage from almost all parties, with the conservative Les Républicains — Le Maire’s onetime political home — saying it was even one of the reasons they questioned supporting Lecornu’s executive, triggering its collapse.

With that, the man who held France’s most powerful ministry longer than anyone, shattered another record: the shortest ministerial tenure in recent history. Unlike Lecornu and his other ministers, Le Maire has stepped away from his caretaker role.

Le Maire acknowledged that his brief quasi-comeback “has provoked incomprehensible, false, and disproportionate reactions from some people.”

Finger-pointing in all directions

The main line of fire against him came from his former party, Les Républicains, which he left in 2017 to join Emmanuel Macron’s camp, as did Lecornu. Conservative leader and outgoing Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau stated that Lecornu broke his trust by appointing Le Maire without informing him in advance.

Le Maire never spared criticism for his former party, and they’ve returned it in kind, holding him responsible for allowing France’s debt to spiral out of control after the coronavirus pandemic. 

During his record seven-year tenure as minister, Le Maire became a familiar face in Brussels and in EU capitals, coming to embody the French push for strategic autonomy, a more confrontational trade policy towards Washington and Beijing, as well as increased subsidies for strategic sectors. 

Le Maire might have won the battle of ideas on the EU stage as the French economic doctrine he pushed with Macron has become mainstream in Brussels, but that didn’t help him gain popularity at home, where he is still perceived as a product of the French elite and as the man responsible for France’s budget troubles.

Fugue suisse

Before his flash-in-the-pan return to political life, and after he left Bercy last year, Le Maire had seemingly found happiness far from politics.

He took a teaching position in the Swiss lakeside city of Lausanne, where he teaches classes every Monday, and became an advisor to Dutch semiconductor giant ASML, while also giving conferences around Europe. 

Freed from the duties of a ministerial life, he could finally devote more time to writing, an occupation that earned him criticism when he was still a minister. He is currently working on a non-fiction book focused on politics, which could prepare the ground for his possible comeback as a presidential candidate in 2027.

Only a couple of weeks ago, Le Maire said that joining Lecornu’s government was “completely out of the question.” But his words did not age well.

On Friday morning, his cellphone rang. His former head of cabinet, Emmanuel Moulin, who is now Macron’s chief of staff, tried to convince him to join the government, but with no success. On Saturday, Lecornu, who started his political career as an adviser to Le Maire in his twenties, also tried and failed. But a lengthy call with Macron on Sunday finally did the trick.

A key argument put forward to convince Le Maire to join the government as defense minister was the fact that, thanks to his good relations with the German political class, he could help build a “Europe of defense” — an idea that remains just that, despite rising threats across the continent.

A quick end

However, on Sunday evening, a few minutes after Moulin announced the list of new ministers, which included Le Maire, the backlash began, startling the former finance minister.

“You can see that I am only a pretext and that the problem is unfortunately infinitely deeper,” Le Maire said on Tuesday in an interview with online media Brut, adding that he “didn’t realize that political life had deteriorated so much in just one year and had become so hysterical, so violent, so detached from reality, so polarized.”

Retailleau’s party was divided internally on whether to support Lecornu’s government and was just looking for a scapegoat to mask the party’s internal division, said one person close to Le Maire, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. Retailleau himself on Monday acknowledged that, regardless of Le Maire, Lecornu’s government would not have lasted. 

Yet now the former finance minister and fiction writer finds himself transformed into one of France’s most famous literary characters: Benjamin Malaussène, the professional scapegoat of Daniel Pennac’s books. 

Regardless, by next Monday, Le Maire will be back in Lausanne with his students and restart his life far from politics. Until the next comeback.