Shadow advisor to Nicolas Sarkozy, support for Eric Zemmour in the last presidential election, the cantor of the union of the rights Patrick Buisson died Tuesday at the age of 74. The police intervened at her home in Sables-d’Olonne, in Vendée, she told AFP, without further details. “Patrick Buisson was a man of great culture, a talented writer and a mad lover of France. His sometimes provocative spirit and his sharp pen will be missed in the political debate,” Marine Le Pen reacted on X. “He saw, before many, the great dangers that threaten our country,” commented Republican boss Eric Ciotti.
Patrick Buisson was a man of great culture, a talented writer and a mad lover of France. His sometimes provocative spirit and his sharp pen will be missed in the political debate.
— Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) December 26, 2023
“Sarkozy’s right hemisphere”
The historian and essayist was notably the advisor to Nicolas Sarkozy when the latter was at the Elysée from 2007 to 2012. And many supporters of the ex-president have accused this promoter of the rapprochement between the right and the theses of the Front national to have a major responsibility in the defeat of 2012. “He contributed to uninhibiting a large part of the electorate” on the right, Marine Le Pen recognized at the time. Seven years later, the political scientist tried to work towards a “national union” with the polemicist Eric Zemmour who subsequently launched the race for the Elysée. He said he was looking for a candidate “who would not come from the National Rally, but would enter into a government agreement with the RN”.
Doctor in History – his thesis focused on France-Algeria relations – Patrick Buisson was “Sarkozy’s right hemisphere”, as Le Monde titled it. Speeches on national identity, security, immigration, suspension of Schengen, referendum to reform unemployment insurance: so many findings hammered out in Sarkozy meetings, attributed to this gray eminence. In candidate Sarkozy’s addresses “to the little ones, to those without rank”, many also saw a score signed by this expert, fond of opinion surveys.
One of its objectives was to win back the impoverished middle classes, who turned to the RN. Patrick Buisson illustrated this desired regrouping of the rights through his own career: from Action Française and the weekly Minute which he directed, to the UMP, via the sovereignist Philippe de Villiers…
“Poison of the Right”
Was the advisor “the poison of the right” as the socialist Julien Dray claimed? He regretted not having gone all the way: “Sarkozy, I didn’t finish it,” he confided to a journalist in 2013. Justice put an end to this ambition. Patrick Buisson was convicted in 2014 for having recorded discussions at the Élysée with Nicolas Sarkozy or with his wife Carla Bruni, without their consent.
The following year, he was indicted in the Élysée polls affair – 130 invoices for advice, including around fifteen polls, paid by the Presidency of the Republic without prior calls for tenders. He was sentenced in January 2022 to two years in prison and a fine of 150,000 euros for concealment of favoritism, misuse of corporate assets and embezzlement of public funds.
“A man of intuition”
Tall, walking slightly stooped, austere physique, Patrick Buisson was “a man of intuition”, according to one of his former pollster clients, who praised his ability to be “interested in iconoclastic things”. In 2005, he surprised and seduced Nicolas Sarkozy by predicting a massive no in the European constitutional referendum, when almost everyone predicted a yes victory. At the Elysée, after the 2007 victory, the essayist was a regular visitor to the president, but without an office or function in the organizational chart. The latter presented him with the Legion of Honor, a ceremony attended by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Everyone then sought his advice, his insight, he said in private, in his office at the History channel that he directed, invaded by books. In a very surprising column in Le Point in 2013, his own son, Georges Buisson, painted a half-hearted portrait of his father, “a master in the art of detecting the hidden sources of opinion”. The text ended with an enigmatic formula: “the Sower also threw his seeds into the thorn bushes”.