Bernard Cazeneuve

Bernard Guy Georges Cazeneuve (; born 2 June 1963) is a French politician and lawyer who served as Prime Minister of France from 6 December 2016 to 15 May 2017. He represented Manche's 5th constituency in the National Assembly from 1997 to 2002 and again from 2007 to 2012, in addition to the department's 4th constituency briefly in 2012 and 2017. For most of his political career, he was a member of the centre-left Socialist Party, but quit in 2022 after disagreeing with the party's decision to join an electoral coalition agreement that included the leftist La France Insoumise.

He was Mayor of Cherbourg-Octeville from 2001 to 2012. In 2012, he was appointed Minister Delegate for European Affairs in the Ayrault government. A year later, Cazeneuve was named Minister Delegate for the Budget after the resignation of Jérôme Cahuzac. In 2014, he was appointed Minister of the Interior in the First Valls government, a role he retained with the formation of the Second Valls government. In 2016, Cazeneuve was appointed prime minister by President François Hollande, after Manuel Valls resigned to concentrate on his candidacy for the 2017 presidential election. Following the election of Emmanuel Macron as President of the French Republic, Cazeneuve resigned from office and returned to private practice. During the 2024 French political crisis, Cazeneueve was reported to be the front-runner candidate for Prime Minister but was ultimately passed over in favor of Michel Barnier.

Education and private career Bernard Cazeneuve was born on 2 June 1963 in Senlis, Oise. His father was the head of the Socialist Party in Oise, which gave him the opportunity to attend a meeting with François Mitterrand. During his studies at the Institut d'études politiques de Bordeaux,

Cazeneuve said that he would be meeting with EU ministers on 20 November in Brussels to discuss how to deal with terrorism across the territory because "cooperation in the fight against terrorism is crucial" in the European Union. "We have to move quickly and strongly. Europe must do it while thinking about the victims of terrorism and their loved ones."

Reports after that meeting indicated that all EU citizens entering or leaving the free-travel area, known as Schengen, should undergo "systematic" screening against pan-European databases. "Terrorists are crossing the borders of the European Union", said Cazeneuve. Indeed, all of the known Paris attackers were EU nationals, who crossed borders without difficulty although they were registered as terrorism suspects, according to The Guardian. Cazeneuve, said the clampdown on borders would take effect immediately. This would be on a temporary basis until the European commission modified the Schengen rules to make the new borders regime mandatory and obligatory; that could take months to enact.

Prime Minister of France Valls announced on 6 December 2016 that, as the likely candidate for the Socialist Party in the presidential election, he would resign to concentrate on campaigning. Cazeneuve was appointed by outgoing President Hollande to replace Valls. The appointment was considered difficult, since it resulted in a change of leadership in the Interior Ministry at a time when the French terror alert was at its highest level. Cazeneuve officially resigned on 10 May 2017, after the official announcement of the results of the presidential election. His tenure as prime minister, at five months and four days, was the shortest in the history of the Fifth Republic until that of Michel Barnier, lasting 90 days. He was replaced by Édouard Philippe, nominated by new President Emmanuel Macron.

Later career After leaving Matignon, he returned to his private law practice. In 2022, Cazeneuve resigned from the Honorary Board of Fight Impunity, a Brussels-based human rights NGO, following corruption allegations against its founder, Antonio Panzeri.

That same year, Cazeneuve resigned from the Socialist Party over leader Olivier Faure's agreement to run a joint electoral list with Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise, known as the Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale (New People's Ecologic and Social Union, or NUPES), feeling that Mélenchon's party and traditional French social democracy were incompatible. It was signed by 400 current and former members of the Socialist Party. In early 2023, he announced "La Convention" (The Convention), a political movement espousing those values. It held its first meeting on 10 June 2023, where Cazeneuve was joined by François Hollande, as well as former Social Democratic Party of Germany leader Martin Schulz and former Italian Democratic Party leader and prime minister Enrico Letta.

On 12 November 2023, he took part in the March for the Republic and Against Antisemitism in Paris in response to the rise of anti-Semitism in France since the start of the Gaza war.

Following the 2024 French legislative election, France experienced months of political deadlock, during which President Emanuel Macron considered various candidates for the position of Prime Minister. The left-wing alliance New Popular Front (NFP), which secured a plurality of votes, nominated Lucie Castets for the role. However, in August 2024, Le Monde reported that Cazeneuve was among the front-runners. His candidacy sparked controversy with the NFP, with members of La France Insoumise (LFI) condemning it as a "total betrayal of millions of voters". Meaning, others, including Socialist Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, supported Cazeneuve and criticised the Socialist Party leadership for obstructing his nomination. Eventually, Macron appointed conservative Michel Barnier as the head of a coalition government.

Personal life Cazeneuve had a wife, Véronique, with whom he had two children. The couple divorced but remarried on 12 August 2015 in Aiguines. They resided in Domaine du Lys-Chantilly, a tree-lined community in Oise not far from Paris. She died in June 2024.

He was a business lawyer from 2006 to 2008.

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