The file is sensitive. Even more with the approach of the presidential election. On the one hand, the red line set by the Ministry of the Interior: do not allow jungles or settling points for migrants to be reconstituted. On the other, a 72-year-old priest and two activists, who went on hunger strike on October 11 to specifically demand that the camps no longer be dismantled.
In the middle is Didier Leschi, director general of OFII, commissioned by the government to converge positions. A local actor, a fine connoisseur of the issue, fears that there is no possibility of an agreement.
In The cross this Tuesday, Didier Leschi nevertheless advances two proposals. First, stop the surprise evacuations, let people be warned upstream and have 45 minutes to pick up their personal effects. Insufficient for the associations, which stick to their initial demand: that the evacuations cease. Second proposal from Didier Leschi: that migrants, a little over a thousand, be offered accommodation solutions outside Calais. This is the sticking point, the DG of the OFII recognizes it himself.
The hunger strikers as well as the associations answer: you cannot force people to be accommodated outside Calais, whereas they are precisely there to attempt to cross the Channel. Most of them are Afghans, Syrians, Sudanese, Eritreans, not deportable because their country of origin is not safe. They do not speak French and dream of joining a Great Britain where they have a contact, relatives, a point of fall …
The government, for the time being silent on the situation in Calais, is giving it special vigilance behind the scenes. “Leschi reports permanently to the Ministry of the Interior “, confides an actor. Because beyond the shelter of migrants, the executive has two subjects: first the priest, “ready to starve in his church “, according to a local elected official. Imagine the emotion aroused… This same chosen one does not exclude “that the prefect take an order for compulsory hospitalization with intravenous injection to force-feed him “.
Second subject: the politicization of the issue. The rebellious deputy of the North Adrien Quatennens has already visited Calais this weekend to see the hunger strikers. “Gérald Darmanin especially has a problem with Natacha Bouchart, the mayor Les Républicains de Calais “, thinks a connoisseur knows. “Darmanin wants to avoid a trial in weakness of a right-wing elected, that she accuses him of letting a jungle be reconstituted. “”This is why Didier Leschi was commissioned, rebounds a parliamentarian. To show that the government is acting, without exposing itself directly. “
Didier Leschi is a senior civil servant, former prefect, who practiced ministerial cabinets… The ideal profile to understand political constraints without doing them himself.