Jacques Serais with AFP / Photo credit: ERIC FEFERBERG / AFP
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07:11, July 21, 2023
This is the only surprise of the cabinet reshuffle announced Thursday evening: Aurélien Rousseau is the new Minister of Health and Prevention. This former professor of history and geography succeeds emergency doctor François Braun. Aurélien Rousseau, hitherto unknown to the general public, was nevertheless an essential cog in the entourage of the executive couple for more than a year.
A shadow man
He is a man in the shadows who is about to take on the light. A technocratic profile who will have to pilot a health care system in crisis, undermined by the lack of doctors and the inexorable growth of the health needs of an aging population. Among the seriously ill, the hospital, which is no longer attractive enough to attract caregivers in sufficient numbers, despite a Ségur de la santé which raised the salaries of hospital staff in the summer of 2021. On the side of city doctors, the new minister will have to face the anger of the unions, who are demanding an increase in consultation.
He will also have in his pocket the bill on the end of life, for which Agnès Firmin-Le Bodo, Minister Delegate in charge of Territorial Organization and Health Professions, was responsible in the outgoing government.
Aurélien Rousseau first refused, then hesitated before finally deciding to accept this mission. It must be said that barely four days ago, this enarque with a socialist fiber left Matignon with a light spirit. He, Elisabeth Borne’s chief of staff for more than a year, left voluntarily from what he called the “terminus of shit”.
Rumors of disagreement with Elisabeth Borne
It was without counting on the insistence of Emmanuel Macron. Since Elisabeth Borne pleaded for the departure of François Braun, the Head of State set a condition: that the Ministry of Health return to this former director of the Regional Health Agency. Aurélien Rousseau piloted the Île-de-France Regional Health Agency during the health crisis. A trying experience from which he had drawn an essay, published in September, (The injury and the rebound, in the black box of the State in the face of the crisiseditions Odile Jacob) to tell “how the things of the State are played out, the decisions are taken”.
A historian by training and enarque attached to the Council of State, Aurélien Rousseau, 47, comes from the left – he was a member of the PCF in his youth -, this man equipped with small round glasses, previously worked in the office of the former mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë, then with the Socialist Prime Ministers Manuel Valls and Bernard Cazeneuve.
Despite rumors of disagreement between Aurélien Rousseau and the Prime Minister, the Head of State wanted the Ministry of Health to return to him. But this appointment also raises questions since the former chief of staff is married to Marguerite Cazeneuve, former adviser to the President and current number 2 of Health Insurance.