Rivers return to their beds. Aurélien Rousseau, a former health minister and chief of staff for former prime minister Elisabeth Borne, has decided to leave Emmanuel Macron's coalition. He will run in the upcoming snap elections under the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire banner in the 7th district of the Yvelines department, in the Paris region, in one of the districts assigned to the Socialists and their partner party Place Publique, Raphaël Glucksmann confirmed to Le Monde. A total of 175 constituencies are assigned to the Socialists, following the agreement reached on Thursday, June 13, with the other left-wing parties ahead of the legislative elections on June 30 and July 7.
Rousseau resigned from the government at the end of December 2023 to express his disagreement with the immigration law, whose right-wing policies he contested. "This touches on load-bearing walls. I'm not lecturing anyone on the left or morality. I can see clinically that it's not possible for me to explain this bill," he told Le Monde, at the time.
Macron had initially been reluctant to accept his resignation, fearing that it would cause a split within his coalition, which had been badly shaken by the debates surrounding the bill. Right up until the last moment, Macron hoped Rousseau would change his mind, until the Council of Ministers meeting on December 20, when the health minister's seat stayed empty. The ex-minister's nomination by the left-wing bloc – an alliance Macron attacked at his press conference on Wednesday – is a further setback for the president's party.
On Sunday, in the European elections, the far-right Rassemblement National came out on top in the Yvelines, with 20% of the vote, ahead of Macron's coalition (18%), Raphaël Glucksmann's list (14%) and the radical left La France Insoumise (12 %). "The far right is at the gates of power, we have to take responsibility," said Rousseau, reached by Le Monde. He justified his involvement in the campaign, and his return to the left, by this "unprecedented situation." He confirmed that he no longer recognizes himself in the "rightward turn" taken by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal's government, which is still hoping to tighten unemployment insurance rules ahead of the election. "Resisting the far right requires momentum on the left," said Rousseau.
Rousseau, from the southern city of Alès, is a graduate of the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration and was head of the Paris region's health agency from 2018 to 2021, where he faced the Covid-19 epidemic. He was also deputy chief of staff to former prime minister Manuel Valls. On leaving the prime minister's office in 2017, a few weeks before the end of François Hollande's presidency that left the Socialists in shambles, Rousseau, a former Communist activist, quipped: "The Komintern had sent me to destroy social democracy. I didn't think I'd succeed so quickly and so well!" Now he's determined to save it.