It’s not a “techno”, not a political one either, a bit of both at the same time. Perfectly unknown to the general public, David Amiel, a 29-year-old normalien with an impeccable school career, is a centerpiece of Emmanuel Macron’s campaign system. The one who pilots the program without appearing, who “provides consistency” without endorsing the paternity of the ideas. Essential for anyone approaching the team responsible for getting the president re-elected. But without an official title, unlike the other major authorizing officer of the program, Pierre Bouillon, head of the Ideas division of La République en Marche (LRM). Together, they coordinated “the twenty-four pages”, this document compiling the proposals of the one who is no longer named other than as “the candidate”.
A digest of macronism, David Amiel is an early walker, even if he volunteered for the Socialist Party (PS) during his studies – like others in the majority, his left is that of the Strauss-Kahniens. Recruited by Philippe Martin, then an economist for Emmanuel Macron at Bercy, supported by precious sponsors like Daniel Cohen, he was part of the team of the first fellow travelers, those who contributed to the drafting of the manifesto. Revolution (XO) published in 2016. It is difficult to imagine greater intellectual and ideological closeness with Emmanuel Macron, whose working groups he already coordinated for the program in 2017, before joining him at the Elysée.
“When they met, both had the economy at heart », summarizes Anne de Bayser, who rubbed shoulders with him at the Elysée – where she was deputy general secretary until 2020 – and is part of the campaign team. Convinced that the traditional right-left divide has been replaced by that of progressivism and populism, David Amiel also believes in the need to combine supply policy and demand policy – we owe him in particular the abolition of the tax on dwelling. A “at the same time” whose coherence he tried to explain in the book co-written, in 2019, with Ismaël Emelien, another walker, Progress does not fall from the sky (Fayard), just after leaving the Elysée. In particular, he pleads for an increase in taxation on inheritances, presented as “ the priority fight of all those who fight in the name of equal opportunities”, but that “the candidate” did not ultimately retain.
Legislative ambition
The young prodigy that all of Macronie finds brilliant and “ really nice », chosen for his agility and his ideological proximity with Emmanuel Macron and with his right-hand man Alexis Kohler, is he, as an economist asks, “armed enough to propose alternative things in the face of an ultra-worked machine »? In fact, he would not change much in the five-year term which is ending, willingly defending the “permanences” of macronism – the attachment to European construction, faith in scientific progress to lead the ecological transition, the need to fight inequalities at the root, the defense of republican values – but recognizes the need for a “change of method”, with this idea of a great permanent debate that would last.
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