The 63-year-old senior official becomes vice-president of the highest French administrative court in a particular context, in the midst of a health crisis and three months before the presidential election.
It wouldn’t be an insult to him to say that he is little known to the general public. Didier-Roland Tabuteau has just been appointed vice-president of the Council of State. It is the highest post of the more than 200-year-old institution, which sits at the Palais-Royal in Paris. Exit Bruno Lasserre, in place since 2018. He retires after reaching the maximum age set at 68 years. Already, a monster pile of files awaits the new vice-president on his desk. Since the outbreak of the Covid at the start of 2020, the Council of State has been inundated with new requests and has often had to render decisions in a hurry.
Didier-Roland Tabuteau, a 63-year-old senior civil servant, has a CV as long as an arm. Its course is all that there is more classic. After graduating from Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and four years at Polytechnique, Tabuteau entered the ENA in 1982. His classmates are named Pierre Moscovici, Guillaume Pepy or Philippe Bas. At the end of school, the political community opens its arms wide to him. At the start of the 90s, he began several round trips to the management of the cabinets of Claude Evin and Martine Aubry at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Bernard Kouchner at that of Health.
Favorable to a “great Safety”
Health is undeniably its strong subject. He was the first director of the Medicines Agency – recently returned to the forefront of the news with the anti-Covid vaccination – in 1993. The agency was created in the wake of the revelations around contaminated blood. An episode of which he does not have good memories.
Invited to testify at the Mediator trial in 2019, the former director of the Medicines Agency then said “Overwhelmed” by the scandal which surrounded the drug marketed by the Servier laboratories and responsible for the death of several hundred people. “I am neither a doctor nor a pharmacist. Should I have turned down the job in 1993? The Minister of Health asked me to build the agency. I had a little administrative skills, I knew how to motivate the teams. Was there a need for medical competence? I will never stop asking myself the question “, said two years ago.
Didier-Roland Tabuteau continues to speak at regular intervals on health topics. In 2017, in a column signed in the world with the director of Paris hospitals, Martin Hirsch, he called for “Create universal health insurance”. The idea then being to bring together Social Security and mutuals in order to “Make substantial savings”. He laid there the foundations of what he calls “The great Social Security”. The idea, recently taken up by the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, could appear in the program of the future candidate Macron.
The task of the new vice-president of the Council of State is immense. First, because his predecessor Bruno Lasserre, whose work was almost unanimously praised, set the bar high. But in addition, the position takes on special importance as the presidential campaign peaks. Didier-Roland Tabuteau will normally take over the presidency of the National Commission for the Control of the Electoral Campaign at the end of January. He will then walk on a wire. His first steps will be scrutinized. The Council of State often takes hits. One day it is criticized for being pro-government, another for bumping into it too much. A crest line to stick to. Next big file on which the position of the Council of State is awaited: the wearing of the hijab in women’s football. Nice welcome gift.