2023-12-27 19:01:08
Jacques Delors, who died on Wednesday December 27 at the age of 98, was an authentic socialist, revolted by injustices, eager to change the course of things. History will, however, remember that he was one of the great Christian Democrats who made Europe. That’s the whole paradox of it. Appointed in 1985 as head of the Commission of the European Communities, the bulimic autodidact, who came from Christian trade unionism, embodied the golden age of the Commission by building, alongside François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, the path to the euro.
But in France, he is the man of rigor, the “Complaining Jeremiah” mocked by Raymond Barre, the undecided man who let his desire rise and finally gave up running in the 1995 presidential election. This missed meeting with the French tortured him. “Either I lied to the country, or I lied to the socialists”, he explained tirelessly, pointing out the gap between his very second-left project and the quasi-revolutionary speech of the first socialist secretary of the time, Henri Emmanuelli. But at the end of his life, he confided to Monde : “Sometimes, yes, I regret not having dared, perhaps I was wrong. »
Lost battles and missed opportunities
The confession took place in June 2013, rue de Milan in Paris, in the premises of Notre Europe, the association that the German chancellor and the head of the Spanish government Felipe Gonzalez encouraged him to create when he left Brussels in January 1995, “while Jospin had not made a move to help me.” Delors as himself: happy and unhappy, his voice a little quavering, his gait made difficult by several attacks of sciatica, but the luminous blue eyes which lit up his entire face.
A few days earlier, pink shirt and red tie, the activist for the European cause had gone “to throw a tantrum” at the Mutualité, in front of the forum of European progressives where he had enjoyed the applause. He urged the EU to accelerate the implementation of the growth pact negotiated in 2012 by François Hollande. “The 120 billion euros of the European recovery plan, who takes care of it? »he growled, before softening: “Don’t be afraid, we will make it!” »
The story he told was filled with hope but punctuated by lost battles and missed opportunities, without however an ounce of malice, because if the man was without complacency, it was first and foremost towards of himself. Neither success nor glory had managed to cure the former intern at the Bank of France of unhealthy shyness, of the feeling of being “an old fool” among the great political beasts he had rubbed shoulders with. The anxiety of doing badly had accompanied him all his life, which he drowned in a bulimia of work. ” I miss him, he said, a crucial quality for a politician: believing in myself. »
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