Paris sends Brussels the anti-Breton

“He doesn’t really like… being in the front and being seen,” said Dacian Cioloș, a former Romanian prime minister and Séjourné’s predecessor as leader of the Renew group in the European Parliament. “I didn’t get the feeling that he puts energy into his own image, and that he wants results, that he wants to work in a team.”

Moreover, Séjourné returns to Brussels not basking in recent glory, but licking his wounds after two election defeats and an unremarkable period as France’s top diplomat.

The centrist Renew Europe group he led for just over two years lost a quarter of its members, including ten French MEPs, in June’s European elections. Séjourné, who continues to lead Macron’s Renaissance Party until a successor is elected in the coming months, also oversaw a defeat in the snap elections Macron called in response to that drubbing at the EU level.

Stéphane Séjourné is vying to take over Thierry Breton’s powerful internal market portfolio. | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images

Before his appointment as European Commissioner, Séjourné’s fortunes seemed to be on the decline, as his position in government and as head of the Renaissance Party was expected to end.

Our man in Brussels

Séjourné, one of the president’s early supporters, met him during a job interview in 2014, when Macron was economy minister and wanted to emerge from a political landscape dominated by socialist heavyweights. The son of a France Telecom executive and a telephone operator, Séjourné was part of a group of political wannabes known as the “Macron boys” or “the Mormons,” nicknames they earned because they tended to act like a kind of bond to stay together. close-knit religious community.

Séjourné’s political fortunes rose steadily under Macron’s mentorship. He first served as an advisor at the Elysée in 2017, then as a Member of the European Parliament for Macron’s Renaissance Party in 2019 and finally as president of the Renew group in the European Parliament in 2021. Last January, Séjourné became Macron’s minister of Foreign Affairs – a position he held until the new French Prime Minister Michel Barnier unveiled his government last month.