Minister Thomas Cazenave, one eye on the public accounts, another on Bordeaux | EUROtoday

Thursday September 21, on the highway which takes him to the Auch tax middle, Gers prefecture, the place he’s making his first journey as minister to advertise the 2024 funds, Thomas Cazenave had the time to immerse himself in a IFOP survey printed the identical morning. Not on taxes, inflation or financial savings, however on the political local weather in Bordeaux, “ [sa] metropolis ​​”. Three years after his crushing defeat in the municipal election (12.7%) in the Gironde metropolis, his possible candidacy is being tested again for the 2026 election. But there is still a way to go: little known, he only collects a third of favorable opinions. “That’s three times more than in 2020! »says with a smile the man who grew up in the Bastide district and still sees himself as “the only truly Bordeaux candidate”.

No one, including him, expected his appointment to Bercy in July. Even if this financial inspector is a veteran of the house (“He’s one of us.”, even admits a director of the ministry). Doubly so, since he occupied both the imposing Colbert building, which houses the general inspection of finances, and the hotel of ministers, where he was deputy director of Emmanuel Macron’s cabinet, in 2016 – the time where he publishes The State in start-up mode (Eyrolles, 2017).

Aware of the notoriety that the role of minister gives him, he hardly hesitated when the secretary general of the Elysée, Alexis Kohler, called him. And on the evening of his appointment, July 21, Thomas Cazenave jumped on the TGV, his files under his arm, to reappear a few hours later on the Caudéran market, in the Gironde city, distributing handshakes and good words.

“My life is Bordeaux, admits this forty-year-old with a very wise physique, well-trimmed beard and small round glasses, who never gets more animated than when he talks about it. I am in Paris during the week to take up my position. » Every weekend, he goes back to Bordeaux where he finds his family, who have not returned to the capital, and works on his local roots. “If I am a minister, it is thanks to the people of Bordeaux”, slips the one who was elected deputy for Gironde in 2022 and who still remains a municipal councilor and metropolitan councilor. It was also in Bordeaux, and not in Paris, that he met King Charles III on Friday September 22.

Listening to Bordeaux wine growers

Since he changed Gabriel Attal – appointed to nationwide schooling – in the funds, his profession has additionally been scrutinized on this metropolis which has seen Jacques Chaban-Delmas or Alain Juppé – each mayor of Bordeaux and prime minister. On at the present time when Thomas Cazenave walks the departmental roads of Gers, Alain Juppé can also be in Bercy, the place the finance inspectorate has invited him to current his Memoirs.

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