adopted, and wished Giscard d'Estaing had taken the opportunity to break from the right-wing UDR (predecessor to the Rally for the Republic, RPR) and form a majority government without them. Failure to do so, she later said, left the Giscardians "hostages" to the right. Simone Veil offered de Sarnez a slot on her list for the European elections in 1979 (when Veil became president of the European Parliament). De Sarnez, who had a ten-month-old daughter and a son on the way, declined at that time, later saying she was glad to have waited for a more compatible political partner. Giscard d'Estaing was defeated in the 1981 French presidential election. De Sarnez later said that despite personal disappointment, she did not entirely regret the political changes brought by President François Mitterrand, of the Socialist Party (PS). Work with François Bayrou In 1978, de Sarnez co-founded the Union for French Democracy (UDF), aimed at developing a center-right coalition to back Giscard d'Estaing and provide a counterweight to the Gaullist right. From 1986 to 1989, she served as special advisor to the chair of the UDF group in the National Assembly, Jean-Claude Gaudin. In this milieu she met François Bayrou, with whom she worked closely for the next 40 years. The two became close working on Raymond Barre's campaign for President in 1988 and were soon inseparable. "Elle, c'est moi, et moi, c'est elle" ("I'm her and she is me") he told those who occasionally tried to drive a wedge between them. When Bayrou became Secretary General of the UDF in 1989, she joined him as his deputy, then likewise at the Ministry of National Education (1993 to 1997) in the government of Alain Juppé. Initially she was an adviser, but then became Director of his Private Office, the first French woman to hold such a senior role without a degree from the École nationale d'administration. From 1997 to 1998, she was the secretary-general of the UDF group in the National Assembly. After the Plural Left won the 1997 legislative elections, in 1989 through 1993 de Sarnez became Secretary-General of the opposition general assembly, while Bayrou was President of UDF. She went on to become national secretary of the UDF, from 2003 to 2007. De Sarnez, who earned a reputation as an outstanding organizer—Raffarin described her as a "gifted politician"—also served as campaign manager for Bayrou's 2007 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Each time,