The scandal surrounding Alexandre Benalla, President Emmanuel Macron’s disgraced personal security aide, and deputy to his cabinet director, has further deepened with his claims to Mediapart that he has remained in close regular contact with the French head of state – despite denials by the presidential office – with whom he says he discusses current affairs, and notably the ongoing civil unrest of the ‘Yellow Vest’ movement.
Benalla, 27, was fired from his post with the French presidency after media revelations in July of video evidence of him assaulting at least two individuals on the sidelines of May Day marches in Paris this year while illegally wearing police insignia.
Benalla, who had served as a bodyguard for Macron during his election campaign, and who was handed his senior job at the Élysée immediately after Macron’s election in May 2017, was recorded assaulting two men and a woman during the May 1st demonstrations along with an employee of Macron’s LREM party.
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He is now formally placed under investigation for the incidents, and faces a possible jail sentence. He received a brief suspension from his duties after the events were made known to Macron’s cabinet chief, but he was eventually sacked after the revelations of the assaults appeared in the media in July. Since then, he has taken up professional activities as a business “consultant”, which included recent trips to Israel and several African countries representing a group of Middle Eastern and Turkish companies.
Mediapart revealed last week that during his travels, he has continued to use a diplomatic passport handed to him during his post with the Élysée, and which was renewed three weeks after the May 1st events.
In an interview on Sunday with Mediapart, Benalla said that two diplomatic passports were given back to him by the Élysée after his dismissal, and the move came from on high. He notably claimed that he regularly conversed with the French president.
“They could never deny this. It will be very difficult to deny it because all these exchanges are on my mobile phone,” said Benalla.
Contacted by Mediapart, the French presidential office, the Elysée Palace, did not respond to our requests for an interview.
However, in a statement to French daily Le Monde on December 24th, a spokesperson had insisted that the office had “no contact” with the president’s former security aide.
Benalla said that his communications with the French president are mainly via the Telegram mobile phone application.
“We talked about diverse subjects,” said Benalla. “It is often on the lines of ‘how do you see things?’. It can be about the Yellow Vests, questions about one person or the other, or about security issues. In sum, it’s ‘What do you make of the thing?’,” said Benalla, adding: “It was already like that before.”
He told Mediapart that he continued to have regular discussions with Macron and members of the presidential office until the revelations last week of his possession of French diplomatic passports. “Then the connection was cut off,” he said.
He insisted that he had always kept the presidency informed of his activities since he was dismissed from his post.
“I explain that I have seen such and such a person, I detail the things that I have been told and their nature. Then, they do what they want with it. Including the president, who I directly informed.” Benalla said that Macron seeks his contact as much as he seeks contact with the French president.
“All the same, it's easy for the Élysée to cut off ties with me if it really wants to,” he said. “It would suffice to stop [my] approaches or to not reply to me. Nobody said anything.”
Asked whether he had physically met with President Macron since being officially fired from his post with the presidential office this summer, he offered an ambiguous reply. Referring to one of Macron’s press advisors, Sibeth Ndiaye, who in 2017 told French weekly L’Express that she “perfectly” accepted that she would “lie to protect the president”, Benalla commented: “I’ll say another thing, people in front of me who tell you that they’re ready to lie to protect the president…”
Benalla said he had never received a formal letter announcing he was fired from his post at the Elysée, but, unsurprisingly, did not consider himself to be still in post with the presidential office. “No, I am an outside element who wants to make good for the guy [Macron] who had confidence in him,” said Benalla. “Today, that can seem a bit crazy, I could have slammed the door and moved on to other things. But I’m still being asked for things, so I continue to respond. I keep relations. That bothers a certain number of people, who are powerful and who act as if the president was under guardianship. They have him get up to phenomenal stupidness.”
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Benalla dismissed the French president’s entourage as “technocrats” who he said “belong to a family worse than the mafia, where everyone has a hold on the other, where everyone owes their place to another”.
He accused Macron’s presidential cabinet chief, Patrick Strzoda, to whom he was appointed as deputy, and Élysée secretary general Alexis Kohler as being “the archetypes of people who don’t help him and make him take bad decisions”.
“They conform to this system,” said Benalla. “I’m sorry to use words which are normally heard in the words of extremists, but it is a reality which exists. A technical and administrative system which disconnects a guy, Macron, who is already not very connected, although brilliant. But when you are surrounded by people who permanently indoctrinate you, it ends up by causing mischief.”
“I refused to adapt to codes and people around me did not understand why the president listened to me and why what I said could have had importance,” added Benalla. “Can you imagine the irritation of these same people when they discovered that I continue to talk to the president […] You have a system that is taken hostage by a high civil service which is also called technocrats, or énarques [graduates of the elite ENA management school], together with a certain number of people who wander in the corridors without knowing which interests they serve other than their own.”
“Part of my heart is with the yellows,” he said, in a reference to the Yellow Vest (gilets jaunes) movement of civil unrest, which began in November, demanding better living standards for low- and middle-income earners. Benalla claimed he had been asked for his views on the movement during the month of December. Contacted by Mediapart, the presidential office denied rumours that Benalla had taken part in a confidential meeting about the unrest on December 9th.
“I will say things that will be denied,” Benalla told Mediapart. “I don’t want to get into this. I want to keep my credibility. The word of Benalla who has already lied about Djouhri, is a word systematically placed in doubt. Each time I say something, the public prosecutor is required to take action. Whatever happens, in the end I am left with the image of being a liar.”
As for the issue of his possession of diplomatic passports, revealed by Mediapart, he repeated previous claims that he was re-issued with them in early October after having sent them back to the Elysée at the end of August.
“I returned a part of my personal effects after an email that I received from General Bio-Farina [military commander of the Élysée Palace] around July 30th, who asked me to make contact with his deputy, a commander,” claimed Benalla. “At the end of August I handed over everything, including the diplomatic passports. How can they say that this hadn’t happened? In September, I was called to be told ‘Alex, we still have a box of your belongings, you have to pick them up’. When I went to the corner of the avenue Gabriel and la rue de l’Élysée [an entrance post of the Élysée] to pick up these belongings in early October, a cheque book, keys and the diplomatic passports were in a plastic bag.”
Asked why he would have retrieved these belongings at a street-side official post, on the outer limits of the presidential office, Benalla said it was “because I am like someone who has the plague”. He claims that the person who handed over the bag of belongings warned him, “don’t do anything stupid with that”. He added: “The person who gave me those did so on orders. Who could give the order? At the very least it would be the head of the president’s cabinet, or at most the Élysée secretary-general [Macron’s chief of staff].” Asked whether it might have been upon the order of the president himself, Benalla replied: “For that, you’d need to ask them.”
Benalla said the French foreign affairs ministry allowed him to use the diplomatic passports as he felt necessary. “If they didn't want me to use these passports, they just had to be disactivated and register them in files. There are procedures, after all. Normally, at the [foreign ministry], after supposed repeated letters, one becomes worried, no? Two diplomatic passports don’t go unnoticed.”
“There was no attempt to retrieve my passports because there were orders to the contrary, that’s all,” said Benalla. “And because they don’t know how to reply to journalists, they get in touch with the public prosecutor. But when you travel abroad with a diplomatic passport, the French embassy is aware that you are arriving. Security services for certain countries like Israel or in Africa are aware. The DGSE [French foreign intelligence service] might be aware.”
Both the Élysée Palace and the French foreign affairs ministry have declared that they were both unaware of Benalla’s use of diplomatic passports in his possession during his recent travels abroad. Benalla himself has confirmed that he recently travelled to “around ten countries” this autumn, apparently on business projects that remain undetailed beyond serving the interests of companies from the Middle East and Turkey.
Benalla says that “heads will roll” over the controversy. Meanwhile, he is now the subject of a second investigation, launched by the Paris public prosecution services after a complaint filed by the French foreign affairs ministry, for “breach of trust” over his continued use of diplomatic passports.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse