The message is clear: those abroad will be looked after by a full-time minister, François-Noël Buffet, and he will report to Prime Minister Michel Barnier for the first time. The government is marking a break with a file largely delegated since 2022 by President Emmanuel Macron to the Interior Ministry of Gérald Darmanin, who had oversight. The new executive is directing another signal of attention to the overseas territories with the appointment of the centrist senator from Mayotte, Thani Mohamed Soilihi, to the post of Secretary of State for the Francophonie.
Rue Oudinot, a 61-year-old conservative lawyer from the Lyon bar and specialist in immigration issues, is taking over. François-Noël Buffet has been a senator for Les Républicains du Rhône since 2004. And in this context, he has not spared his criticism of the executive.
“Man of dialogue”
Close to François Fillon during the 2016 campaign, a member of the commission of inquiry following the Benalla affair at the Élysée from 2018 to 2023, outraged by Mr Darmanin’s attitude in 2022 in the case of the British fans stranded at the Stade de France, the senator has also, and above all, as president of the legal commission since 2020, been very involved in New Caledonia.
Co-author of several reports on overseas territories, Buffet co-led the 2022 fact-finding mission on the institutional future of the territory, with his Republican colleague Philippe Bas, the Socialist Jean-Pierre Sueur and the centrist Hervé Marseille. On this issue, where the Senate’s Law Committee has established itself as the place of competence and commitment, the Elysée would have done better to follow parliamentary recommendations, these four senators stressed in unison.
“I regret that at the highest level we did not read our reports because we clearly said that wanting to vote strongly on the law on the electorate was a mistake”says Jean-Pierre Sueur. “François Noël Buffet is without a doubt a man of dialogue and I have seen his pragmatism in other circumstances”adds Jean-Pierre Sueur, referring to the alliance that LR had made with Gérard Collomb in 2020 to block the passage of environmentalists in the metropolis of Lyon. “His qualities will be valuable and I wish him the best of luck because he will occupy one of the most difficult positions”.
Cost of living
The Left, however, criticises him for his positions on the immigration law, for which he voted in agreement with the hard line of Bruno Retailleau, now Minister of the Interior. Within the UMP, Buffet was appointed national secretary in charge of immigration in 2014. In favour of a restriction of territorial rights in Mayotte, he should satisfy the elected officials of the territory. But the issue of immigration, which is also becoming increasingly sensitive in Réunion or in Guyana, will not be the easiest to address without a parliamentary majority.
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