This is an unexpected interview. Jérôme Cahuzac is the guest of David Pujadas on Thursday evening on LCI. It had been ten years since he last appeared on television. In the show 24 Hour Pujadas, the former Minister of the Budget convicted in 2018 for tax evasion and laundering of tax evasion will answer the journalist’s questions live. “The first contact dates back to a few months, we spoke regularly”, reveals the journalist at the microphone of Europe 1.
A single condition set by Jérôme Cahuzac
“I immediately felt a certain desire in him to try to return to public debate, to ask himself if he was an outcast for eternity or if he had a chance to express himself. From there, it was a long discussion”, specifies David Pujadas. “But, from the start, it was pretty clear that we were going to do something. He doesn’t know the questions.”
Jérôme Cahuzac would have posed a single condition to accept the interview “I cannot watch the images of the National Assembly again, when I am lying”, he would have warned. “Don’t put them in my face.” These famous images at the National Assembly are those where Jérôme Cahuzac denied the existence of a bank account in Switzerland, revealed by Mediapart. For four months, he continued to categorically deny the facts, before acknowledging them before the investigating judges in April 2013.
“His journey is a Greek tragedy”
Since then, Jérôme Cahuzac has served his sentence. According to David Pujadas, this is one of the reasons why he agrees to speak on television. Today, the former politician has become a doctor again, he practices in Corsica. If the interview will of course return to this affair and the lie which ousted him from the political scene, David Pujadas also wishes to question him on other subjects.
“Jérôme Cahuzac is someone very special, with a very brilliant profile and promised to the highest destinies in the government”, estimates the journalist. “In the first Ayrault government, he already had a special place. He has enormous oral fluency, and a very great knowledge of the files. So I want to have his opinion on the political life of “Today, on the countryside, on the left. His journey is a Greek tragedy. I have a real curiosity about how we live a destiny that is suddenly interrupted. I want to hear him on that.”
24 Hour Pujadas with Jérôme Cahuzac is broadcast live Thursday evening at 7 p.m., on LCI.