PRESIDENT Jacques Chirac’s appointment this week of Jean-Pierre Raffarin as France’s interim prime minister is a calculated gamble aimed at showing disenchanted voters that the newly re-elected president has understood their woes.
An amiable and modest provincial senator, Raffarin’s does not fit the mould of the French career politician: he was not educated at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, the elite finishing school for mandarins; he has earned his living outside politics; and he does not make a habit of polishing his image on twice-weekly TV talkshows.
All that makes him a sensible, indeed a sensitive, choice for a president well aware that a large part of the reason why France was plunged into mayhem last month was that voters were fed up with the slick, self-satisfied and self-serving Paris political elite that neither speaks its language nor shares its concerns.
The little-known president of the Poitou-Charentes regional council and vice-chairperson of the small free-market Liberal Democracy party, he is also an eminently reasonable moderate likely to prove more palatable to the millions of centrist and left-wing voters who helped re-elect Chirac to keep the far-right leader Jean-Marie le Pen at bay.
Chirac is plainly gambling that the right stands its best chance of winning the general election in June if it presents an inclusive, unifying government and programme to the shellshocked electorate, rather than setting out a more obviously hardline right-wing stall that would reflect the resurgence of Le Pen’s racist National Front.
The left already quite likes Raffarin’s style: when former finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn became the first leading Socialist to call on all leftwingers to vote for Chirac, Raffarin shook his hand and said publicly that he hoped, in similar circumstances, he would have had the courage to do the same.
His chief rival for the post was Nicolas Sarkozy, a brash, sharp-tongued and hard-right MP from a chic Paris suburb whose very face, even friends admit, “is enough to send the average Socialist into orbit”.
On Tuesday Raffarin announced the establishment of an Interior Ministry with extra law and order powers, a development that his conservative coalition hopes will help it to win the parliamentary elections on June 9 and 16.
The interior, security and local freedom ministry, charged with reorganising and reinforcing the police, will be headed by Nicolas Sarkozy, a former finance minister in Chirac’s Gaullist-RPR movement.
Raffarin’s most novel appointment was that of the first female Defence Minister: Michèle Alliot-Marie, the president of the RPR, who played a prominent role in the presidential campaign. He named Dominique de Villepin, Chirac’s chief of staff, foreign minister.
The surprising exclusion was Jean-Louis DebrÃ