THOUSANDS OF judges, lawyers and police officers staged rare protests across France yesterday as president Nicolas Sarkozy struggled to retrieve the initiative after a series of bruising controversies for his government.
Judges took to the streets in 15 cities and towns in protest at a claim by Mr Sarkozy that the judicial system was to blame for the death of a young woman, Laetitia Perrais, whose body parts were found in a pond near Saint-Nazaire in western France last week. The president blamed “serious dysfunctions” in judicial and police services for the release from prison, without proper supervision, of a man now under investigation in relation to the murder of the 18-year-old woman.
However, judges – joined yesterday by lawyers, police and prison officers – accuse Mr Sarkozy of resorting to populist gestures to distract from the government’s failure to provide them with enough staff to monitor offenders.
The government has accused the protesters of an “excessive” reaction, but the unusual sight of thousands of judges on the street has come at a bad time for Mr Sarkozy. He appeared on national television last night to try to reassert himself after a trying week for the government.
In an attempt to staunch the continuing row over ministers’ holidays in north Africa, Mr Sarkozy has asked cabinet members to choose France as their holiday destination in future. The government has also announced it will accelerate the adoption of a law on conflicts of interest in the public service.
These announcements follow a week of controversy over alleged links between senior ministers and authoritarian Arab regimes. François Fillon, the prime minister, admitted this week that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak lent him an aircraft during a new year holiday in Egypt with his family.
That revelation came as Michèle Alliot-Marie, the foreign minister, was resisting calls to resign over the disclosure that she and her partner used a private aircraft allegedly belonging to an associate of Tunisia’s former president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, while the country’s uprising flared in late December.
To make matters worse for Mr Sarkozy, he yesterday received one of the clearest signals yet that the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, may return to France to contest next year’s presidential election for the Socialist Party.
In an interview with Le Point, Mr Strauss-Kahn’s wife Anne Sinclair said she hoped her husband would not seek a second term in Washington.