“He doesn’t like so much … to be in front and to be seen,” said Dacian Cioloș, a former Romanian prime minister and Séjourné’s predecessor as the leader of the Renew group in the European Parliament. “It was not my feeling that he invests energy in his own image, and he wants results, he wants to work in a team.”
What’s more, Séjourné returns to Brussels not basking in recent glory, but licking his wounds after two election defeats and an unremarkable stint as France’s top diplomat.
The centrist Renew Europe group he led for just over two years lost a quarter of its members, including 10 French MEPs, in June’s European election. Séjourné, who still leads Macron’s Renaissance party until a successor is elected in the coming months, also oversaw a defeat at the snap election Macron called in response to that EU-level drubbing.
Before his nomination as European commissioner, Séjourné’s fortunes appeared on the wane as his position in government and as the head of the Renaissance party were expected to end.
Our man in Brussels
One of the president’s earliest supporters, Séjourné met him during a job interview in 2014 when Macron was an economy minister seeking to emerge from a political landscape dominated by Socialist heavyweights. Séjourné, the son of a France Telecom manager and a switchboard operator, was one of a band of political wannabes known as the “Macron boys” or “the Mormons,” nicknames they earned because they tended to stick together like a close-knit religious community.
Séjourné’s political fortunes rose steadily under the mentorship of Macron. He first served as an adviser at the Elysée Palace in 2017, then as an MEP for Macron’s Renaissance party in 2019, and finally as president of the Renew group in the European Parliament in 2021. This past January, Séjourné became Macron’s foreign minister — a job he held until new French Prime Minister Michel Barnier unveiled his government last month.
