Marielle de Sarnez

Marielle de Sarnez (27 March 195113 January 2021) was a French politician who served as Secretary of State for European Affairs under Prime Minister Édouard Philippe.

Marielle de Sarnez was born in the 8th arrondissement of Paris on 27 March 1951 and grew up in a family with close ties to the French political establishment.

From 1961 to 1967, her Gaullist father Olivier de Sarnez, who had been in the French Resistance, was chief of staff to Roger Frey, Interior Minister, and her mother was responsible for floral arrangements at the Élysée Palace.

Nevertheless de Sarnez joined the May 1968 protests while still a high school student, was kicked out of Lycée Sainte-Marie de Passy Catholic girls school and participated in the occupation of neighboring boys school Lycée Jean-Baptiste Say.

(Her father was elected as a deputy to the National Assembly on the Gaullist conservative Union of Democrats for the Republic—UDR—ticket a month later.) After earning her baccalaureate from Lycée La Fontaine, de Sarnez began working in retail.

In 1973, Ladislas Wroblewski, who cofounded the Independent Republicans (RI) party with Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, offered de Sarnez a part-time role as secretary of the Young RI arm.

At RI, she met Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who went on to become prime minister; Dominique Bussereau, who became president of the Assembly of the Departments of France; and eventual Minister of Justice Pascal Clément.

In 1978, de Sarnez co-founded the Union for French Democracy (UDF), aimed at developing a center-right coalition to back Giscard d'Estaing and provide a counterweight to the Gaullist right.

She was involved in the Presidential campaign the next year, creating popular "Giscard à la barre" ("Giscard at the helm”) t-shirts. Giscard d'Estaing was elected and de Sarnez rose quickly through the ranks. Later de Sarnez grew disappointed by the rightward turn, especially the anti-abortion politics, that the new administration adopted, and wished Giscard d'Estaing had taken the opportunity to break from the right-wing UDR (predecessor to the Rally for the Republic, RPR) and form a majority government without them. Failure to do so, she later said, left the Giscardians "hostages" to the right. Simone Veil offered de Sarnez a slot on her list for the European elections in 1979 (when Veil became president of the European Parliament). De Sarnez, who had a ten-month-old daughter and a son on the way, declined at that time, later saying she was glad to have waited for a more compatible political partner.

Giscard d'Estaing was defeated in the 1981 French presidential election.

De Sarnez later said that despite personal disappointment, she did not entirely regret the political changes brought by President François Mitterrand, of the Socialist Party (PS).

From 1986 to 1989, she served as special advisor to the chair of the UDF group in the National Assembly, Jean-Claude Gaudin.

In this milieu she met François Bayrou, with whom she worked closely for the next 40 years.

The two became close working on Raymond Barre's campaign for President in 1988 and were soon inseparable.

"Elle, c'est moi, et moi, c'est elle" ("I'm her and she is me") he told those who occasionally tried to drive a wedge between them.

When Bayrou became Secretary General of the UDF in 1989, she joined him as his deputy, then likewise at the Ministry of National Education (1993 to 1997) in the government of Alain Juppé.

Initially she was an adviser, but then became Director of his Private Office, the first French woman to hold such a senior role without a degree from the École nationale d'administration.

From 1997 to 1998, she was the secretary-general of the UDF group in the National Assembly.

After the Plural Left won the 1997 legislative elections, in 1989 through 1993 de Sarnez became Secretary-General of the opposition general assembly, while Bayrou was President of UDF.

Devoted to the cause of a unified Europe, she began her elected career in 1999 as a member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Île-de-France, heading the UDF list in 2004 and serving until 2017.

In 2002, they earned 6.84% of the first-round vote, a fourth-place finish while the neo-Gaullist right-wing (RPR) and extreme-right (National Front, FN) candidates Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen, respectively, advanced.

Along with much of the political establishment, Bayrou threw his support behind Chirac.

She went on to become national secretary of the UDF, from 2003 to 2007.

De Sarnez, who earned a reputation as an outstanding organizer—Raffarin described her as a "gifted politician" —also served as campaign manager for Bayrou's 2007 and 2012 presidential campaigns.

Each time, Bayrou, a center-right candidate running under the UDF banner, failed to advance to the second (final) round.

In 2007, it was 18.57% (Nicolas Sarkozy, a right-wing candidate then running with the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) and Socialist Party (PS) candidate Ségolène Royal advanced) and 9.13% in 2012 (Sarkozy and PS candidate François Hollande advanced).

The 2007 election loss nevertheless marked a significant turning point, as Bayrou announced publicly he would not vote for Sarkozy, breaking from the dominant right-wing UMP to form the centrist Democratic Movement (MoDem).

De Sarnez became its First Vice-President.

The UMP's successor the Republicans (LR) blamed Bayrou (and retaliated) for Sarkozy's loss and a number of UDF members split to create the New Centre party to support Sarkozy, leaving only three MoDem deputies in the National Assembly, including Bayrou, not enough to form their own group in the legislature.

Ex-comrades accused de Sarnez of having creating a vacuum around Bayrou.

A 2007 profile in Le Monde describes de Sarnez's role with Bayrou: "Nothing is done without her consent."

A member of the Union for French Democracy (UDF) until 2008 when she joined the Democratic Movement (MoDem), de Sarnez was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 1999 until her appointment as Minister for European Affairs in the Phillipe government in 2017.

A member of the UDF before 2008 and MoDem after 2008, de Sarnez served as vice-chair of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, and sat on the European Parliament's Committee on Culture and Education.

She was in the forefront for Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and it inspired the choice to make orange the signature color of MoDem.

De Sarnez resigned after a month due to a scandal involving alleged payment for work she did not perform, but was elected a few days later to represent the 11th constituency of Paris in the National Assembly.

She was a committed Europeanist and centrist, pushing the MoDem to resist currents on each end of the political spectrum.

De Sarnez was a longtime collaborator to party president and three-time candidate for the presidency of France, François Bayrou.

In the 2016 presidential primary held by LR, de Sarnez endorsed Alain Juppé over Sarkozy, but both lost in a surprise upset by François Fillon.

Bayrou, in consultation with de Sarnez, decided not to run in the 2017 French presidential election and they both instead supported Emmanuel Macron of La République En Marche! as an alternative centrist candidate, ultimately successful.

While de Sarnez made her name as "the woman who made Bayrou", he also encouraged her to strike out as a candidate herself, insisting, "She's not a number two. She's a number one."