While the absence of a minister was noticed last Tuesday during the commemorations of the 20th anniversary of the explosion of the AZF factory, Jean Castex, visiting Toulouse this Saturday, went to the Memorial site. He laid a wreath in honor of the 31 victims of the disaster.
Visiting the region on Saturday, Jean Castex made a point of going to Toulouse to the site of the AZF Memorial. On Tuesday, the 20 local authorities commemorated the disaster that left 31 dead on September 21, 2001, but no member at the 2011 ceremonies, no member of the government had made the trip ten years later.
Some were moved by it, even if the mayor of the Pink City, Jean-Luc Moudenc, had explained to The Dispatch not to have “asked for anything”, neither visit, nor absence of visit, leaving the initiative to the government. In either case, “I would have been reproached,” he conceded, except that on the side of Matignon, also called Tuesday, we were obviously waiting for a sign from Toulouse to send a member of the government …
Yesterday, Jean Castex therefore put an end to the confusion by laying a wreath of flowers at the foot of the Memorial at the end of the morning. The Prime Minister was accompanied to the bruised site by the Secretary of State for European Affairs, Clément Beaune, and by the prefect of the Occitania region, Etienne Guyot. In all discretion, the press had not been invited to this moment of meditation.