It is the return of a right-wing figure to business. Patrick Stefanini was appointed, Friday, November 29, special representative of the Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, with the main mission “strengthening the readmission system for people in an irregular situation”indicated Place Beauvau, in a press release.
Enarque, State Councilor, Prefect, Mr. Stefanini had a long career on the right. Faithful servant of Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, Alain Juppé (he was convicted in 2004 with him in the Paris City Hall fictitious jobs affair) and François Fillon, he was notably the campaign director of Valérie Pécresse when she was a candidate for the presidential election in 2022.
At 71, after retraining in consulting, Mr. Stefanini is returning to a ministry he knows well. He was notably, at the end of the 1980s, deputy director of foreigners and cross-border circulation, but also, later, one of the architects and then the secretary general of the ministry of immigration and national identity , established in 2007 under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, and which dedicated the Place Beauvau concentration to the management of migration issues.
“A utilitarian vision”
“He is a very competent person, estimates Didier Leschi, director of the French Office for Immigration and Integration. He is one of those who really thinks about migration issues. » In any case, there is a book dedicated to it: Immigration, these realities that are hidden from uspublished in 2020 by Robert Laffont. In this work, he exposed his thoughts and praised the work of Charles Pasqua, Brice Hortefeux and even Nicolas Sarkozy, who was, in his eyes, “the only President of the Republic to [avoir porté] an overview of its migration policy (…) under the name of “selected immigration”.
He also defended the interest of agreements for the concerted management of migratory flows, which consist of organizing legal migration routes and making them conditional on cooperation from the country of origin in the return of its irregular nationals.
“He is a reasonable right-wing man, who has a utilitarian vision of immigration. He thinks we need to slow it down, even though he knows we need it in economic matters.”summarizes Jean-François Carenco, former prefect and minister delegate responsible for overseas territories, who was his classmate at the ENA.
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Source: Lemonde