“He doesn’t really like… being in front and being seen,” said Dacian Cioloș, former Romanian prime minister and Séjourné’s predecessor as leader of the Renew group in the European Parliament. “I didn’t get the sense that he invested energy in his own image and that he wanted results, that he wanted to work as a team.”

What’s more, Séjourné returns to Brussels not basking in recent glory, but licking his wounds after two electoral defeats and an unremarkable period 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 elections. Séjourné, who still leads Macron’s Renaissance party until a successor is chosen in the coming months, also saw a defeat in the snap elections called by Macron in response to that drubbing at the EU level.

Before his appointment as European commissioner, Séjourné’s fortunes appeared to be declining as his position in the government and as leader of the Renaissance party was expected to end.

Our man in Brussels

Séjourné, an early supporter of the president, met him during a job interview in 2014, when Macron was economy minister and seeking to emerge from a political landscape dominated by socialist heavyweights. Séjourné, the son of a France Télécom executive and a telephone operator, was part of a group of aspiring politicians known as the “Macron boys” or “the Mormons,” nicknames they earned because they tended to stick together as a very close-knit religious community.

Séjourné’s political fortunes rose steadily under Macron’s mentorship. He first served as an advisor at the Elysee 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. Last January, Séjourné became minister of foreign affairs. Macron’s Foreign Affairs, a position he held until the new French Prime Minister, Michel Barnier announced his government last month.