WHEN FRENCH president Nicolas Sarkozy hastily carried out the ninth cabinet reshuffle of his term last week, the immediate imperative was an external one: to help restore France’s credibility in the world after its clumsy handling of the north African revolts.
But the president’s decisions were also driven in a subtler way by a firmly domestic dilemma: how to restore Sarkozy’s credibility among his own electorate at a time when his stock is lower than ever.
After weeks of controversy over foreign minister Michèle Alliot-Marie’s maladroit handling of the Tunisian revolt, Sarkozy had no choice but to remove the veteran Gaullist just over three months after she assumed the post. Lampooned for offering the know-how of France’s security forces to Tunisia just days before former president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali fled the country, she was further damaged by revelations that, as the protests raged in late December, she travelled across Tunisia on a private jet belonging to a businessman with alleged links to the regime.
Alliot-Marie was replaced by former prime minister Alain Juppé, whose return to the department he held for two years in the mid-1990s completes a remarkable political comeback. Juppé’s senior ministerial career was thought to have ended when, in 2004, he was found guilty of mishandling public funds and returned to Bordeaux to focus on his role as mayor.
Despite never having been close to Sarkozy, the man Jacques Chirac famously called “the best among us” now finds himself coming to the rescue of a beleaguered president.
Juppé’s elevation signals a shift in the power relationship over foreign policy between the Élysée Palace and the Quai d’Orsay, home of the foreign ministry in Paris. French diplomats have long resented being sidelined by a coterie of advisers in Sarkozy’s Élysée, and the president’s foreign ministers – Bernard Kouchner and Alliot-Marie – have often cut isolated figures.
A group of serving and former diplomats recently published an open letter blaming Sarkozy’s “amateurish” and “impulsive” approach to foreign affairs for France having lost its voice on the global stage. In a newspaper article he co-wrote last year, Juppé himself criticised the “unprecedented weakening” of the foreign ministry.
Juppé is understood to have taken the job on condition that he will have a meaningful role in foreign policy. He will be helped by another of the cabinet changes: the removal of Sarkozy’s trusted chief-of-staff Claude Guéant to take over at the interior ministry.
Guéant, a former prefect, ran a parallel diplomatic unit from the Élysée for the past four years, leading sensitive missions to Rwanda, Syria and Algeria on behalf of the president, and often upstaging the foreign minister. His departure makes Juppé the most powerful cabinet member after prime minister François Fillon.
With a presidential election due in just over a year, Sarkozy’s reshuffle can be seen as his last opportunity to set up his government for the electoral battle ahead. That explains the removal of his long-time friend Brice Hortefeux from the interior ministry to take up a new role as political adviser at the president’s side. The ruling UMP is growing increasingly concerned by the progress of the far-right Front National (FN), and believes security will be one of the most important issues in next year’s election. The government’s problem is that, despite its tough rhetoric, headline crime figures have been fairly static under Hortefeux.
Removing him deprives the FN of a target. It may also help avert embarrassment later this year, when a ruling on Hortefeux’s appeal of a fine for making racist remarks is due. In a speech to announce the reshuffle, Sarkozy did not even mention the names of Alliot-Marie or Hortefeux.
Overall, the reshuffle is a reminder that Sarkozy finds himself in a position of weakness. His much-vaunted policy of rupture with the old personalities of the Chirac era and of ouverture, or opening up, to political opponents is long forgotten. He has come to rely on the authoritative, steady Juppé just as he did last year on the popular, measured Fillon.
The president’s popularity ratings still hover around 30 per cent, and a poll in Le Parisien yesterday suggested Marine Le Pen would come first in a presidential election if it was held today — the first time a survey has put an FN leader ahead of Sarkozy.
The French president has staggered from one setback to another for the past year, and the conditions for his defeat are clearly forming. Nobody calls him l’hyper-président any more.
But the election is a long way off. The Socialist Party has yet to mend its divisions and agree on its best candidate. And Sarkozy can always remind himself that his immediate predecessors – François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac – were both languishing in the polls a year before they were re-elected.
