The time for the redesign has come. At the end of the week, the ex-mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois and current Minister of the City, Olivier Klein, will be fixed. The 56-year-old man is indeed in the short list of the 6 members of the government approached for the reshuffle. Since the riots in the suburbs following the death of Nahel, he has struggled to find his place in the Macronist political system.
The minister, who entered the government in July 2022, went from one conflagration to another from 2005 to 2023. Then (Communist) deputy mayor of Clichy-sous-Bois in October 2005, during the first riots in the suburbs, Klein was very visible , as the newspaper Liberation reminds us. He spent his days and nights trying to mediate with buildings or at the town hall.
In 2023, during the new Nanterre riots, everything is very different. More discreet, he now intervenes in the shadow of the executive and justice duo: Dupond-Moretti and Gérald Darmanin. He is the one who keeps in touch, always in the background, with Nahel’s family and the mayor of Nanterre, Patrick Jarry. A senior official, questioned about his role as Minister of the City in this context, moreover confided bluntly, “It is he who should be at 8 p.m. but he does not break the sound barrier”.
Within the majority, we do not forgive much for this former socialist, who rallied to Macron in 2021, without having taken his card at Renaissance. The man, polite and discreet, in addition to not succeeding in imposing himself against the duo of Beauvau and the bar, is struggling to make his “score” heard, loaded with costly long-term policies, specifies Liberation. Despite his knowledge of the City’s files, as a former elected official and his recognized human qualities, “sensitive, friendly and accessible”, a councillor, during an interview, admitted aloud what everyone was thinking quietly: “He is one of the ministers who have less control over the circuits of power”.
According to a Renaissance deputy close to him, in addition to these difficulties, he is undergoing “deleterious competition”, from the ministers of the pole of the ecological and energy Transition of which he is a part. But also of the National Council for the Refoundation of Housing. And to drive the point home, the deputies of his own constituency are annoyed by his lack of a respondent… In short, he is criticized: “a weak incarnation”, relays a recent article from the Obs.
The former child of the city of Chêne-Pointu in Clichy-sous-bois, appointed a year ago at the head of the National Agency for Urban Renewal, does not have to be ashamed of his record in this area with an inflated envelope of 5 to 12 billion euros for 2014-2030. However, he continues to present himself as a “Clichois”, “local and militant elected representative”, then as a minister; without real modesty, but more out of pragmatism. “You never know what the future holds for us,” he told Liberation in an interview in early July. All is said.
