Patrick Cohen becomes political columnist again in the morning show and Charline Vanhoenacker daily columnist – Libération

The journalist will return to work in September at the public station that he left with a bang in 2017, according to information from “Le Parisien” on Wednesday. Comedian Charline Vanhoenacker will return to a column every morning.

Seven years later, here he is once more on the most listened to morning radio show in France. Patrick Cohen will be returning to France Inter next fall, according to information from Le Parisien on Wednesday, July 10, confirmed by the person concerned to Libération. The station director, Adèle Van Reeth, made his recruitment official in the followingnoon to the editorial staff of France Inter. The 61-year-old journalist, mostly busy with TV and C à vous lately, will return to the studios of the Maison ronde in September to provide the political editorial in Nicolas Demorand and Léa Salamé’s 7/10. That is, the 7:44 a.m. column, provided for fourteen years by Thomas Legrand (columnist at Libération and producer of En quête de politique on Inter) and for the last two years by Yaël Goosz, who remains head of the political service. According to the management of France Inter, he should also be present in another regular meeting, for the moment undefined, at the start of the school year.

Patrick Cohen had never really made a secret of his desire to return to France Inter, where he was a morning presenter from 2010 to 2017. A desire that had until then been complicated by Laurence Bloch, director of Inter who later became director of programs and broadcasts at Radio France. The reason: the conditions under which Patrick Cohen had left for Europe 1 in 2017, a “hostile takeover bid” (according to Laurence Bloch) by Arnaud Lagardère at the time, hiring several figures from public broadcasters to boost declining audiences. The transfer would not prove very conclusive, with Patrick Cohen seeing the Europe 1 morning show taken away from him following one season, before leaving in the summer of 2021 following the station’s forced Bollorisation. The radio man had nevertheless bounced back on the side of Radio France, hosting for two seasons the Esprit public on France Culture, before a transfer aborted at the last moment to France Info in the summer of 2023. Laurence Bloch now retired since July 1, here is “PatCo” once more in his old morning show. “France Inter and Patrick are currently in discussion […] and I am delighted regarding it,” Laurence Bloch finally said in an interview with Télérama on June 14.

“A satirical counterpoint in the morning show”

A return whose timing is not insignificant, in a particularly chaotic political context, between the rise of the extreme right in the ballot boxes and the media violence of the Bolloré media. “Faced with the National Rally, we need something solid,” judges a voice on the France Inter channel who believes that his return is a consensus. The management of France Inter specifies for its part that it wanted to evolve the exercise towards decryption or even fact-checking, rather than on the political game and the mysteries of power. Patrick Cohen’s editorials on France 5, more focused on facts than on opinions, would thus be particularly appreciated on Radio France. Very popular among the Macronist electorate, the journalist can also be critical of the action of the executive, as on May 31, with a highly regarded column on unemployment insurance reform facing Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. The kind of editorial he will be able to reproduce at the start of the school year in September on the channel that remains the most listened to in France, according to the Médiamétrie results revealed this Wednesday. The France Inter morning show had the best season in its history in the second quarter, bringing together an average of 4.7 million listeners each day.

Among the other movements expected at the start of the school year, the end of the Grand Dimanche soir is well and truly confirmed. But Charline Vanhoenacker, in addition to her weekly show Bistroscopie, will return to a daily column in the morning show between 9 and 10 a.m. from Monday to Thursday, a “Charline moment” which will take place following the interview with Léa Salamé. “In a very political year, there was a need to put a satirical counterpoint in the morning show,” explains the management of France Inter. Léa Salamé will return to the 8:20 interview at the start of the school year. She had stepped back in recent weeks, during the campaign for the European elections and then the legislative elections, so as not to be accused of a conflict of interest because of her relationship with MEP Raphaël Glucksmann. Finally, the end of the daily program Jusqu’ici tout va bien, announced in June, will make way for an extended version of Matthieu Noël’s Zoom Zoom Zen between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. as revealed by Le Parisien, with a second hour more focused on “infotainment”, with “new voices of humor”, the station promises.