So Rachida Dati, France’s glamorous justice minister, has outlived her political value to the president, Nicolas Sarkozy, as the first Muslim of North African origin to hold a senior government post.
Having survived the hostility of judges, court officials and prison officers, and the global furore over her return to work within days of giving birth, Mlle Dati will leave the Government after all – although not until June, and her near-certain election to the European Parliament. M Sarkozy, has decreed, by slotting her into second place on his party’s candidate list for Greater Paris, that the next phase of her still-fledgling political career will be in the ‘purgatory’ of Strasbourg.
Readers would not expect yet another prurient airing of the minister’s famously ‘complicated private life’. Besides, with Spain’s former prime minister, José Maria Aznar; Sarkozy’s younger brother, François; and French sports minister, Bernard Laporte, all making it quite clear they are not the father of her daughter, and a Danish sperm bank refusing to comment, what complications are there left?
This article, therefore, is about the surely more fascinating subject of the complicated public lives of Mlle Dati and her ministerial colleagues. Almost lost in the speculation about whether the minister is breast-feeding was another of Mlle Dati’s early public engagements after returning to work for M Sarkozy’s apparently-undelayable announcement of his judicial reform programme. She presided over a New Year’s party for workers in Paris’ 7th arrondissement, the central district of which she happens to be mayor. It is a classic example of the long-standing French practice of cumul des mandats – the accumulation of electoral mandates, or simultaneously holding several political offices at different levels of government. It may be incompatible to be both minister and an MEP, but minister and mayor of a sizeable city or district? pas de problème [no problem]! And the second salary is always handy.
The apparent conflict of interest seems strange to us, but to the French, so does our constitutional blurring of executive and legislative powers. French ministers must resign their seats in either the Senate or National Assembly. Even in France, though, cumul is controversial and, certainly in opinion polls, most voters say they would like it abolished.
No set of French politicians will go that far, but the past decade has seen some half-serious attempts to restrict it – interestingly, under the presidency of Jacques Chirac, the man who managed to combine the posts of prime minister and mayor of Paris.
Prime ministers Lionel Jospin and Jean-Pierre Raffarin both required some ministers to resign their mayoralties, and laws were passed applying to all parliamentarians. So emasculated were the eventual constraints, though, that in the last National Assembly, 15% of members held two additional elective offices and 89% at least one – 49% being mayors.
And now M Sarkozy is turning cumul into almost a personal crusade. Last February, 21 of his 33 ministers became temporarily part-time as they ran for local government office. Some were long-standing mayors seeking re-election, but eight were neophyte ministers, with no electoral base or experience, sent out by M Sarkozy into Paris and the provinces to acquire electoral legitimacy by becoming mayors or deputy mayors – and incidentally, strengthen his government’s central control.
Several, unsurprisingly, encountered local antagonism on top of their government’s national unpopularity, and were defeated – finance minister, Christine Lagarde; culture minister, Christine Albanel; and Senegal-born junior foreign minister, Rama Yade. Mlle Dati was obviously more successful. However, becoming mayor of a Parisian district of the president’s choosing by being parachuted in to head the candidate list of the president’s party hardly gives one either an independent political base or job security, as Mlle Dati has discovered.
The contrast with some other ministers is marked. Interior minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, was mayor of the Basque coastal resort of Saint-Jean-de-Luz for 10 years. Defence minister, Hervé Morin, has been mayor of Épaignes in Normandy since 1995. And budget minister, Éric Woerth, is mayor of Chantilly. None are unsackable, but their political bases make them less beholden to the president and give them something to fall back on.
Meanwhile, what better position is there from which to secure the odd financial or infrastructural favour for that base and its voters than inside the Government?
Chris Game is professor at the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), University of Birmingham
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