FRENCH ELECTIONS: The French Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, didn't waste time consolidating Sunday's victory, when the centre-right won two-thirds of the 577-seat National Assembly.
Mr Raffarin started the day by submitting his resignation to President Jacques Chirac, who promptly reappointed him. He then shuttled back and forth across the Seine to seek Mr Chirac's blessing for an expanded, 38-member government, which Mr Raffarin announced before a celebratory dinner with the 355 new deputies of the Union for the Presidential Majority.
The principal cabinet posts remain unchanged from the government formed on May 7th.
Mr Nicolas Sarkozy still ranks second, at the head of a "super-ministry" of the interior and domestic security. The former secretary general of the Élysée, Mr Dominique de Villepin, kept the foreign ministry, and Ms Michèle Alliot-Marie the defence ministry. She is the first woman to hold the portfolio. Mr Francis Mer, the business executive who created the world's largest steel company, Arcelor, is still finance minister.
One member of the interim cabinet, Mr Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, lost his position because he is under investigation in a party financing scandal. His job as junior minister for European affairs was given to Ms Noelle Lenoir, a former member of the Constitutional Council.
The former speaker of the European parliament, Ms Nicole Fontaine, was named industry minister. Ms Claudie Haigneré, a former astronaut, is in charge of research and new technologies.
Mr Raffarin wore a sky-blue tie all day. Blue, the colour of the centre-right, was much in evidence. "Five Years Without Parole", said the headline of the leftwing daily Libération, above a photograph of a smug-looking Mr Chirac against a blue background. The story alluded to doubts about the president's financial probity, as well as his total grip on power. The right has not held the presidency, National Assembly and Senate concurrently since 1978.
Today Mr Chirac will commemorate the 62nd anniversary of Gen Charles de Gaulle's appeal to the French Resistance. When the right lost the 1997 election, Gaullism was written off. Now the Gaullist Mr Chirac is arguably as powerful as his idol was in 1958.
It is the left that talks of "resistance", promising to turn the city of Paris - where the 9: 12 ratio of left to right-wing deputies was reversed in the left's favour - into a bastion of opposition.
Yet even as the right prepares to elect its speaker of the National Assembly on June 25th, and to devote an extraordinary session of parliament next month to the people's number one concern, security, there are small reminders of the real France outside.
Mr José Bové, an anti-globalisation campaigner, denounced the government for waiting until they'd won the election to notify him he must serve a three-month sentence for destroying a McDonalds. A transport strike grounded half the buses in Nancy. Paediatricians stopped work to demand higher wages, and flights will be disrupted tomorrow, when air traffic controllers go on strike.
