Laurent Wauquiez

Laurent Wauquiez (2018)

Laurent Timothée Marie Wauquiez (born April 12, 1975 in Lyon ) is a French politician ( Les Républicains ). He was Minister for Universities and Science from June 2011 to May 2012 and has been President of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Region since January 2016 . From December 2017 to early June 2019 he was party chairman.

Origin and education

Wauquiez comes from a family of industrialists from the Tourcoing region who worked in the textile and shipbuilding industries. His father Philippe Wauquiez was director of Indosuez Scandinavie and ran an investment consultancy, his mother Éliane Wauquiez-Motte is mayor of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon . Its region of origin is the Haute-Loire department in Auvergne .

In 1994 Wauquiez enrolled at the École normal supérieure in Paris for history. After completing his first degree and further studies at Sciences Po , he entered the École nationale d'administration (ENA), the elite administration college in France, where he was the best of the class in 2001. During an internship at the French embassy in Cairo and other stays, he learned Arabic .

Entry into politics

Already in the 1990s, the Minister of Social Affairs Jacques Barrot became aware of Wauquiez, who later supported him in the election campaign for the 2002 parliamentary elections .

After leaving the ENA, he got a job at the Conseil d'État . When Jacques Barrot moved to the European Commission in 2004 , Wauquiez ran for the now vacant parliamentary seat in the National Assembly . He won the by-election in the Haute-Loire department and, at the age of 29, became the youngest member of parliament at the time. There he took on projects for the then Minister of Education François Fillon .

In autumn 2005 he joined Nicolas Sarkozy , then interior minister and party leader of the Union pour un mouvement populaire , and was appointed to a party office. In 2006 he published a book about his time as a young MP and the absurdities of political life in France, which established himself as a media personality.

Government offices

Wauquiez in 2010

After the parliamentary elections in 2007 and the confirmation of his mandate, he was appointed government spokesman with the rank of State Secretary . Since the local elections in 2008 he has been mayor of Le Puy-en-Velay , the capital of the Haute-Loire department (last confirmed in 2014). In a subsequent cabinet reshuffle, he moved from the government spokesman's post to the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Labor under Christine Lagarde , where he became State Secretary for Labor.

In November 2010 he was promoted to Minister Assistant for European Affairs under Foreign Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie , and in June 2011 to succeed Valérie Pécresse to Minister for Universities and Science. With the recall of Prime Minister François Fillon and his cabinet in May 2012 by the newly elected President François Hollande , Wauquiez left the government.

In the regional elections in the newly formed region Auvergne Rhône-Alpes in November 2015 Wauquiez went for Républicains as the leading candidate to what the centrist Modem regarded as a problem because they found it difficult to support the considered to be quite populist Wauquiez. Wauquiez's right-wing list of several parties led by the Républicains won the election in the second round with 113 out of 204 MPs, so that he was elected President of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes on January 4, 2016.

Party career

In the parliamentary elections in 2012 , Wauquiez defended his seat in the National Assembly and sided with François Fillon in the power struggle of the UMP and was the latter's candidate for the office of deputy party chairman, who was defeated by Jean-François Copé at the party congress in November 2012 . In the following party crisis, Wauquiez became one of the - now six - deputy chairmen of the UMP in January 2013.

When Nicolas Sarkozy took over the leadership of the UMP again in 2014, Wauquiez pledged his support in what was viewed by many as treason, having previously emerged as a critic of the former president and his reign. Thereupon he became General Secretary of the UMP in autumn 2014 and thus held the third highest position after the Chairman and Deputy Chairman Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet . After the reorganization of the UMP in May 2015, which has since been called Les Républicains , he has been its General Secretary since the beginning of June 2015. In December 2015, he benefited from Kosciusko-Morizet's dismissal after her criticism of Sarkozy and became vice chairman. From the end of August 2016 he was acting chairman of the party, as Sarkozy stepped down for his presidential candidacy in the primaries. After François Fillon was elected Republican presidential candidate in late November 2016, Wauquiez was reappointed the party's first vice-president, while Fillon de facto took over the party leadership.

On December 10, 2017, Republicans elected Wauquiez as their new party leader. After his party's poor election results in the European elections in May 2019, he resigned from the party chairmanship on June 1, 2019.

Political positions

Wauquiez belongs to the right, Gaullist wing of the Republicans. In 2010 he founded the think tank Droite sociale in order to develop ideas within the party for a social policy that should counter the dominance of left parties in this area. He has emerged as a critic of same-sex marriage and the European Union . In his EU-skeptical book Europe: il faut tout changer ( German  Europe: It must change everything ), which appeared in the 2014 European election campaign , he called for the Schengen Agreement to be abandoned and the European Union to be limited to a core of six states. which also aroused sharp criticism from within the party. The then party leader Copé Wauquiez held up against populism. "On the question of immigration policy, Wauquiez has set Nicolas Sarkozy's party to positions that come close to those of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ."

Web links

Commons : Laurent Wauquiez  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

1. ↑ Adrien Morcuende: Elections régionales: En Rhône-Alpes-Auvergne, le MoDem s'allie finalement aux Républicains. In: Le Monde , July 24, 2015 (French).
2. ↑ Alexandre Lemarié: Hortefeux, Ciotti, Morano… L'organigramme complet de la direction de l'UMP. In: Le Monde , January 15, 2013 (French).
3. ↑ Mael Thierry: Wauquiez soutient Sarkozy: Le retour au bercail d'un ambitieux. In: L'Obs , September 11, 2014 (French); Ariane Chemin, Alexandre Lemarié: Laurent Wauquiez, the “bad boy” de la droite. In: Le Monde , May 21, 2015 (French).
4. ↑ Arthur Berdah: NKM et Wauquiez confirmés dans le nouvel organigramme of Républicains. In: Le Figaro , June 2, 2015 (French).
5. ^ Bernard Accoyer nommé secrétaire général du parti Les Républicains. In: Le Monde (online). November 29, 2016, accessed December 1, 2016 (French). 
6. ↑ France: Laurent Wauquiez is the new Republican boss. In: Spiegel Online . December 11, 2017. Retrieved June 9, 2018 . 
7. ^ Droite Sociale. Web presence of the think tank; Vanessa Schneider: Wauquiez veut “Lutter contre les profiteurs du haut et les profiteurs du bas”. In: Le Monde , October 26, 2011 (French).
8. ↑ Laurent Wauquiez sur le mariage homo: suicide mediatique ou stratégie politique? ( Memento of the original from March 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Journalism On Line , November 19, 2013 (French). 
9. ↑ Matthieu Deprieck: Trop euro-critique, Wauquiez vit un grand moment de solitude à l'UMP. In: L'Express , April 16, 2014 (French).
10. ↑ FAZ, September 25, 2018, p. 8.