” Le cowboy in the saloon. Yes, “saloon”, I said “saloon”. » Invited to the Rencontres de l’avenir, Friday 7 November at the Saint-Raphaël (Var) convention center, Minister of Justice Gérald Darmanin gave, in front of almost 1,000 people, a lesson in political strategy, as could Nicolas Sarkozy, who was also present at this annual forum last year.
When asked by Nicolas Bouzou – an expert in the field – about the difficulty for a political leader to “unblock subjects” within protective but restrictive legal rules, Gérald Darmanin assured that a minister can “change things”, provided he chooses three or four objects during his mandate and not “150 things”, and above all, if he applies his own method: “Cowboys in the saloon.”
“Two hits on the ceiling”
In front of a concentrated but initially confused audience, Gérald Darmanin put on a measured but sharp performance: “If a cowboy enters a bar without making a scene, everyone is playing cards, drinking beer, talking loudly and no one hears what he says. » In the same way, “if a minister enters the salon of democracy, interministries, Bercy and social networks, we also do not hear what he says,” continued the Minister of Justice. On the other hand, if the cowboy “takes his gun and fires two shots into the ceiling,” the people stopped, looked, and “there he could sit and talk.”
It is this Western-style strategy that Gérald Darmanin happily employs in confronting the scourge of mobile phones in French prisons. These means of communication – which are clearly illegal in penal institutions – allow, according to the minister, drug traffickers to control the trade from their cells, engage in corruption, and sometimes organize their escapes or sponsor murders. To prevent this, the “Darmanin cowboys” opened two high-security prisons, in Vendin-le-Vieil (Pas-de-Calais) and Condé-sur-Sarthe (Orne), intended for the most dangerous drug traffickers.
What does this have to do with cowboys in saloons? These prisons, apart from walls, require the creation of a legal regime inspired by the Italian anti-mafia model, which allows inmates to cut off all contact with the outside world. And to get it – which was not won –, Gérald Darmanin explained to the public Raphaël that he first demanded that the detention of a drug trafficker in these airtight prisons be decided by the Minister of Justice for “a period of five years”.
Maximalist strategy
This explosive proposal, which the minister knew was unconstitutional, was like two shots of a cowboy in a bar: helping to attract attention and then launching negotiations. First with the Council of State, which the Minister of Justice said he had surveyed and would reach an agreement with within three years, knowing that this proposal would be revised downwards by the political parties present in the National Assembly – two years after behind-the-scenes negotiations, according to the minister.
This political path led him, preventively, to the Constitutional Council, which suggested reducing this extraordinary regime to one renewable year, a period that was finally included in the law on drug trafficking of June 13, 2025. Here is the saloon move! “We don’t care if we end up with a renewable year, because the year is renewable! justified Gérald Darmanin before being ironic. If I had first asked for one year (instead of five, editor’s note), I would have arrived at just fifteen days…”
The “cowboy method in the saloon”, theatrically described by Gérald Darmanin, and entertaining some convention centers, actually corresponds to a well-known strategy. In negotiation psychology, this is the anchoring effect: a technique that consists of resolving an argument with extreme demands. In politics, cowboy Darmanin embodies the technique of maximalist demands: throwing high to get acceptable results.
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Answer
In addition to recounting the saloon action, Gérald Darmanin puts on his presidential shoes for 2027 or, at least, as a candidate for the nomination. In Saint-Raphaël, the Minister of Justice called for “open primaries” of the right-wing and center groups – his “political family” – to avoid being “annihilated” by the right-wing and left-wing groups in the event of a spread at the starting line.
Of course, Gérald Darmanin has not (yet) run as a candidate, but at the Saint-Raphaël convention center, the minister detailed the big ideas of what a program could look like. He said he believed that “the person who is the most assertive in terms of authority, the most humane on a social level and the most pro-business on an economic level” will have a chance of being elected. Soon to be a cowboy on the Élysée?
