FRANCE: Lara Marlowe reports from Paris on a prime minister whose humble manner and ability to listen, Mr Chirac hopes, will persuade his compatriots to accept compromise.
The French were fed up with politics and politicians, so President Jacques Chirac's centre-right devised a legislative campaign void of debate or substantive issues.
No one better epitomises France's new anti-politics than the Prime Minister, who can take much of the credit for the triumph of Mr Chirac's Union for the Presidential Majority (UMP) in yesterday's poll: Jean-Pierre Raffarin, anti-politician.
Until Mr Raffarin appeared on the evening news on May 7th to announce his new government, few French people had ever seen him. The 53-year-old senator and president of the Poitou-Charentes region has never been elected to national office.
He hasn't played a role in a nationwide election campaign since he co-founded the "Young Giscardians" in the 1970s. "His motto could have been, 'Small is beautiful'," says Hervé Algalarrondo of the Nouvel Observateur.
Mr Raffarin was president of a small region and his only cabinet post was as junior minister for small and medium-sized businesses, which he calls "enterprises on a human scale". He refuses to change. "I've been advised to go to a stylish hairdresser and a chic tailor," he said after he was appointed. "It is out of the question."
In just six weeks, Mr Raffarin's broken nose, hunched shoulders and loose collars have become familiar to tens of millions of Frenchmen.
Though on the opposite side of France's ideological divide, Le Monde's cartoonist Plantu has endeared him to the country by invariably portraying the prime minister carrying a baguette under his arm - an allusion to legislation he initiated to protect traditional French bread.
Variations on his name have become a national pastime. France is raffarinée, L'Express magazine announced last week. "Right-wing France is seized with raffarinomania," says Le Monde. Libération calls his provincial aphorisms raffarinismes, while the former socialist minister Ségolène Royal dismissed the sayings as raffarinades.
Now that they are under his orders, the ambitious, sharp-tongued ministers of the interior and foreign affairs, Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique Villepin, have stopped calling him raffarien (Raff-for-nothing).
Mr Raffarin says his objective is "to respond to what French people have asked for: that politicians act, that they talk less, that they think less of personal ambition and do more on the ground".
Since taking office he ended a seven-month financial dispute between the government and doctors, and told his cabinet to keep quiet after the ecology minister praised the merits of nuclear power and the transport minister spoke out against a post-election pardon for parking tickets.
Mr Raffarin has refused to reply to demands that he raise the minimum wage more than the mandatory inflation-indexed rate of 2.3 per cent next month. The socialists did not simplify his task by creating five different minimum wages while they were in power.
Mr Raffarin studied business at the Ecole supérieure de commerce de Paris, then started his career as director of marketing at the Jacques Vabre coffee company. The coffee he serves these days is decaffeinated, consensual pabulum.
"I may be chubby, but I have energy," he said on May 7th. "And I'm determined to make sure we change methods of government: less pretension, less arrogance, more team work . . . A minister is a servant. I remind them of that." In a book published in January entitled For a New Governance, Mr Raffarin calls himself "a sort of engineer in human energy". Politics is not a sport, he writes. "It's a form of contained violence . . . I know that swollen heads are the ones that burst. You climb the steps one at a time."
Next month, Mr Raffarin will ask the National Assembly elected yesterday to vote laws reducing income tax by 5 per cent immediately and increasing spending on justice and security by €6 billion. "I hope that we'll have advanced enough not to have to convene in September," he told Le Figaro. The French are already speculating whether Mr Raffarin's honeymoon with the electorate will end in the autumn, when his government may start privatising public sector companies and chipping away at acquis sociaux (acquired rights), partly out of the need to meet EU budget criteria.
Mr Raffarin last year called the prime minister's job "the worst in politics" and said he "would not wish it on a friend". The left accuse him of being the puppet of the former prime minister Alain Juppé, whose attempts to reform the French civil service and retirement system led to a strike-bound "winter of discontent" in 1995.
But where Mr Juppé comes across as cold and arrogant, Mr Chirac hopes Mr Raffarin's humble manner and ability to listen will persuade his compatriots to accept compromise. "I will reform, because I'm a free man," he says. "I'm not at (the prime minister's office) Matignon to hang on or to win time. I wasn't programmed in advance for this job . . . By consequence, I'm not afraid to have to leave one day."