Rachida Dati is the surprise of this reshuffle. By becoming Minister of Culture in the Attal government, she has her sights set on Paris City Hall.
She was the blind spot of all predictions. Rachida Dati was named Minister of Culture in Gabriel Attal’s new government on Thursday January 11, to everyone’s surprise. The mayor of the 7th arrondissement of Paris, a member of the Les Républicains party, former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy, reached an agreement with Emmanuel Macron, whose policies she had criticized so much in the past. For her as for the presidential camp, this unexpected alliance is a bet.
At the heart of this bet, the 2026 municipal elections. Because Rachida Dati has never digested her defeat against Anne Hidalgo in 2020. Since then, “my fight is Paris,” she repeats. Between her and the socialist mayor, the war has become personal. On the side of the Macronists, 2020 also leaves bitter memories: that of the Benjamin Griveaux scandal then that of the defeat of Agnès Buzyn in the first round of the municipal elections. Here is what Emmanuel Macron promised Rachida Dati: to put her at the head of a list common to the right and the center in 2026.
Rachida Dati will now be able to campaign from one of the most prestigious ministries. A political coup that David Alphand, vice-president of the LR group at the Council of Paris, welcomes: “She is already competent on the sovereign aspects, she is now taking on the cultural issues neglected by the team of the mayor of Paris. She is expanding its stature, offers a prospect of broadening the Parisian electoral base”, judges the elected official in the columns of Le Monde.
For Macron, the poaching of Rachida Dati is the surprise of this reshuffle which will make us forget that the other major portfolios remain in the hands of the same diehards. It is also a new way of asserting oneself in a Sarkozy right-wing line and of encroaching a little more on that of LR, a few months before European elections which are shaking the presidential camp.
The only problem is that LR management did not appreciate this new poaching. Rachida Dati was immediately excluded from the party, which could well decide to present its own candidate against her in the next municipal elections. In Parliament, LR will also remember the bad move played by the president, while the latter often has to count on the right to obtain a majority on his texts, as was the case in December on the immigration bill. Fortunately for the Macronists, no large-scale text is expected in the Assembly in the coming months.