A Prime Minister who praises train travel and who actually prefers Falcons? A “false controversy”, evacuated this Wednesday the government spokesman, Gabriel Attal, in reaction to the publication of an article by Mediapart calling into question Jean Castex’s air travel.
Asked about the subject at the exit of the Council of Ministers, Attal tried to minimize the affair, evoking “a handful of trips out of the 315 that the Prime Minister has made since his arrival at Matignon”. He prefers to praise the mobility of Jean Castex: “The Prime Minister is fond of one thing, it is field trips and meetings with the French, he has shown it since his arrival at Matignon.”
Trips of less than three hours
At the origin of the controversy, an article published Tuesday evening and entitled “Jean Castex: an immoderate passion for the jets of the Republic” in which Mediapart affirm that “the former mayor of Prades frantically uses the Falcons of transport squadron 00.060 (ET 60, formerly ETEC), aircraft of an army unit that members of the executive can rent, in particular for long journeys or emergencies”.
But also : “Based on an analysis of his journeys between February 2021 and February 2022, our research shows that Jean Castex preferred to use private planes to travel from Paris to cities such as Nantes (Loire-Atlantique), Bordeaux (Gironde), Lyon (Rhône), Angoulême (Charente) or Caen (Calvados)”, or journeys less than or equal to three hours by TGV.
The investigation site takes pleasure in recalling that, on November 13, 2020, Jean Castex had signed a circular reaffirming the obligation to“exemplary public actors”, which must go through “ecological sobriety”. The official document states that “the air route can only be authorized when the journey time by rail is greater than three hours”…
“Logistics”
Gabriel Attal defends that as many trips (315, therefore), “obviously, that involves some logistics” which the train could not answer. He goes like this “three imperatives” to fill in, impossible to quantify and which give full latitude to the prince’s act. That’s why I wrote to you “of security” – “the Prime Minister is notably accompanied by security officers and a doctor” –, “availability” – “he must be able to return to Matignon at any time in the event of a crisis” – and the“time management imperative” : “The Prime Minister must be able to reconcile the follow-up of the files and his desire to be in contact with the French as much as possible.”
And when Mediapart points out that the trips of the Prime Minister on the move are a “ecological and economic aberration”, the government spokesperson recalls “that there is no explosion in travel expenses, on the contrary.” For the “ecological sobriety”, on the other hand, we will come back.