Posts tagged Nicolas Sarkozy

Rachida Dati caused a furore when she went back to work as France’s justice minister only five days after giving birth last year. Now an MEP, she explains how her penchant for stilettos can coexist with her drive to succeed in politics

It seems a little unfair to focus immediately on what Rachida Dati is wearing. This, after all, is a woman whose extraordinary rise to power has taken her from a council estate upbringing to the highest echelons of French politics. She was the second of 12 children born to north African immigrant parents, neither of whom could read or write, and yet by the time she was 41, she occupied one of the most senior roles in government as President Sarkozy’s justice minister, the first woman of Arab descent to be given a key ministerial position in the French cabinet. At 44, she is now a single mother to a one-year-old daughter, a member of the European parliament and the mayor of the 7th arrondissement in Paris. There can be little doubt that Dati has many more substantial concerns than either her clothes or her appearance. But, at the same time, it is almost impossible not to mention the leather trousers.

Unless you are a Hells Angel or a death metal fan, it takes a certain kind of self-confidence to carry off a pair of leather trousers. A woman who wears them is usually unafraid of being noticed and when Dati enters the lobby of the central London hotel where we are due to meet, her long, slim legs are swathed in discreetly expensive black leather, offset by vertiginously heeled black boots and vivid red lipstick. She walks briskly across the thick carpet, unaware of the admiring glances that trail her like a swarm of bees. It is hard to visualise anyone looking less like the florid-faced, flaky-scalped politician of popular imagination.

There is part of me that wonders whether Dati will be offended to be asked about her appearance, but this turns out to be entirely wrong. She is only too happy to talk about her clothes. “For a long time, ‘femininity’ has been synonymous with ‘triviality’, but that is not the case at all,” she says, her gold hoop earrings shaking slightly as she nods her head for emphasis. “Femininity is part of being a woman. It is part of my identity to preserve my femininity.”

Later, Dati tells a story about having her photograph taken in the street earlier in the day “and when we looked at the picture there was a line of teenage girls behind me and all of them had their eyes down, looking at my shoes!” She laughs, her brown-black eyes lighting up with unexpected enthusiasm.

It is difficult to imagine a British female politician expressing the same unabashed candour about a love of fashion. When, two years ago, Dati attended a French state banquet in a slashed-to-the-thigh midnight blue evening gown, it prompted a period of rueful questioning in the UK press about why our own female MPs were so sartorially uninspired.

In Westminster the consensus appeared to be that in order to be taken seriously, it was best not to draw attention to the fact one was female. Dati does not approve: “I’ve always been like this, even when I was 15, 20, it was always important to me to be well-dressed. It’s important for me to hold onto my femininity because it’s authentic to me and, you know, I was asked not to. I was told by my predecessor [at the Ministry of Justice], Elisabeth Guigou, a very pretty woman, that it wouldn’t be long until I gave up my high heels. Well, I never wanted to do that.”

Her clothes, it seems, go to the very core of Dati’s identity; they provide both a means of self-expression and a symbol of her success – a sign of how far she has come from her impoverished start in life. She has said frequently in the past that being well turned out “is a question of showing respect towards others”, an opinion that echoes Sarkozy’s own conviction that there is nothing wrong with displaying the fruits of hard-won success.

But while Sarkozy’s penchant for Rolex watches and fat cigars is gently tolerated by the French electorate, Dati’s love of designer labels has attracted vocal criticism. As justice minister, she infamously posed for a 2007 interview in Paris Match sporting fishnet tights and a pink leopard-print Dior dress, at a time when she was engaged in a series of judicial reforms that would result in drastic job cuts. Bruno Thouzellier, the president of the Syndical Union of Judges, summed up the national mood by accusing her of showing “frivolity in the face of hardship”. Damaging rumours started to circulate that Dati was more interested in celebrity than the daily grind of politics.

Was she surprised by the criticism? “There are subjects and preoccupations that are much more important in the country. It doesn’t interest me to concentrate on my little world, it interests me to address the major issues that concern the French people… That’s more important to me than what people say about photo shoots.”

But is the media scrutiny more pronounced than it would be if she were a man? “It’s not that there is more intrusion, it’s that there is more curiosity, because, first of all, it’s only recently that women have occupied so many senior posts, so it has become much more noticeable. Sometimes if they [women] make mistakes, it’s not that they make more than the men, but it’s that we talk about them more often.

“I think you face the same challenges as a female journalist or a female cashier – it’s just because what I do is public, so everything is amplified. When you are a politician, you can say ‘hello’ and it is like saying it down a loud-speaker. Everything is amplified: the criticisms are amplified, the compliments are amplified, so the ups and downs seem far more violent, but ultimately it’s the same journey faced by other women.”

Dati believes the criticism she faces springs from class resentment more than anything else. “It’s the idea that certain things aren’t for me, that I’m not allowed to wear Dior – not that I always do wear Dior, by the way – but that it’s not allowed for someone like me [from an immigrant background]. For years, I didn’t think it was a class issue, but now I’m certain it is.

“It’s aggravating for them [the critics] not to be able to classify me. I’ve never made a point of my origins, so I don’t fit easily into that narrative of someone who comes from an ethnic background. I don’t speak about my private life, I’ve stayed authentic to myself, so they don’t know what to make of me. I’m someone who wears the trappings of privilege but doesn’t come from a privileged background, so they can’t make sense of it. I’m not easy to classify.”

Historically, however, the French have expected their politicians to embody a sense of dispassionate reserve and seriousness. To many, Dati’s penchant for flash-bulbs and fashion labels seemed a distasteful error of judgment. According to Agnès Poirier, a French cultural and political commentator, Dati antagonised her colleagues by “using her private life to enhance her political career”. By contrast, says Poirier, the 34-year-old sports minister, Rama Yade, “has stuck to the French culture of not mixing her private life with her public and is gratefully rewarded for this with an enormous popularity in France”.

In many ways, the Paris Match debacle seemed to reflect France’s conflicted attitude towards its women. Although Sarkozy has championed greater gender parity to government (Dati was one of seven women appointed to a 15-strong cabinet after his election in 2007), universal suffrage did not exist in France until after the second world war and it is a society still dripping with misogynist assumptions about male and female roles. Three of the senior women appointed by Sarkozy – including Dati – have since been replaced by men and only 18% of MPs in France’s lower chamber are women.

When the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal unsuccessfully stood against Sarkozy for the presidency, she was asked repeatedly about who was caring for her daughter during the campaign – a question that was apparently never posed to the centrist candidate, François Bayrou, who has six children, or the eurosceptic Philippe de Villiers, who has seven.

Has Dati ever experienced similar sexism? “Not very directly, no, because I’ve had a very particular trajectory. I come from a very modest background, from foreign origins. I was the first in my family to be born in France, so my personal journey is one of progression, and sexism was more or less a matter of course. There were so many other difficulties to face along the way that encountering sexism, in the end, well, it came to seem almost a privilege.”

She laughs as she says this, but the point is a serious one. In a country where the political system has for centuries been the preserve of an elitist, white, male clique (until recently, the vast majority of French politicians were graduates of the “grandes écoles“, a handful of highly selective universities open to only the top 1% of the student body), Dati’s trajectory has been all the more astonishing.

For Vivienne Walt, the Paris correspondent for Time magazine, one of Dati’s greatest strengths, and the reason for her enduring popular appeal, is that she does not come from “the usual elitist white male cookie-cutter mould of French politicians … People are fascinated [by her].”

“It’s true that I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t worked,” Dati says. “I came from the Middle East, my parents could neither read or write, I had no resources, I had no privileged family, so all that I’ve achieved is through work.”

Dati’s father, Mbark, was a stonemason from Morocco and her mother, Fatim-Zohra, was an Algerian farm girl. Dati grew up in a council estate in a troubled suburb north of Lyon and the family struggled to make ends meet. “We didn’t have many material goods, we were a poor family, but that didn’t affect us because we were very loved children,” she says. “I think the love of your parents overrides everything else.”

When Mbark got a job on a building site at a local Catholic convent school, he persuaded the mother superior to allow his two oldest daughters, Malika and Rachida, to study there. Dati took to the school immediately: she worked hard and got good grades, routinely coming top of the class. From the age of 16, she took on several part-time jobs to help support the family, including selling Avon beauty products door-to-door and working on a supermarket check-out. From a young age, Dati was clearly driven by a ferocious desire to succeed, and yet, when I ask whether she felt the need to prove herself, she visibly bristles. “In which domain?” In education or, later, in her chosen career? “Listen, I have been working full time since I was 16 and a half, so you shouldn’t give me a different treatment. My only judges are the people who elect me. I respond to them. The rest doesn’t interest me.”

Did her mixed-race heritage ever make her feel like an outsider? “No,” she says, a touch frostily. “I have never put an ethnic interpretation on my life story or felt myself to be part of a ghetto.” As if to prove it, Dati is unequivocal in her support for banning the burka in public institutions, an issue currently being debated in France. “When you are part of a society, the first foundation of this social contract is trust,” she says. “To be totally hidden, to not show one’s face, is a challenge to that trust and one cannot construct a society without trust in each other… [the burka] does not correspond to our values.”

Later, Dati admits that she feels the question of proving herself, of working hard to try and fit in “is asked of me because of my background in a way that it wouldn’t be about other people”. In fact, she rather resents the way her life has been packaged up and made into a neat little allegory of the underprivileged immigrant girl made good. “My life is not a fairytale,” she says. “My life has been made through work, through success, also failure and pain and that’s like everyone else.

“I was the product of my parents and I ended up as minister for justice. I did that by working hard and sometimes to the detriment of my personal life or to my life as a woman, but that’s got nothing to do with fairy stories.

“My life was nothing exceptional or extraordinary, but it corresponds to the values of France: work, recognition, free schooling, access to university. I seized all the chances that came my way.”

Where did that drive come from? “It’s temperament… I have always been curious about life, about people, about things. I have a rich life and have had a lot of luck.”

But it could so easily have gone in another direction: her younger brother, Jamal, is a convicted drug dealer. Another brother, Omar, has also been investigated for drug offences.

Dati, however, took a different path. At university in Dijon, she studied economics and began bombarding business leaders with letters asking for advice, internships and jobs. She went into accountancy and then switched to law, where her swift rise up the ranks of the judiciary brought her to the attention of the young and ambitious minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, who appointed her as his adviser in 2002.

At first, it was not an obvious alliance. Sarkozy’s right-wing sympathies and pugnacity seemed to jar with Dati’s more liberal sensibilities, but the two of them went on to become extremely close. For Sarkozy, himself a child of Hungarian immigrants, Dati seemed to embody his vision for a new France that was both egalitarian and ethnically diverse. For her part, Dati calls their relationship “a very personal attachment because I’ve worked for him for a long time. I’ve got a lot of respect for him.”

Sarkozy would go on to promote her, unelected, to one of the highest offices of state, causing widespread irritation among senior government figures. Although it is common in France to pluck ministers from non-political life, it made Dati more vulnerable to criticism and it was not until 2008, when she stood for mayor of the 7th arrondissement in Paris, that she was given the popular mandate. “In politics, you only exist if you are elected,” Dati says now.

Sarkozy, who had enthusiastically backed his protegée despite her lack of political experience, then turned on Dati when her attempts to implement radical court and prison reforms foundered in the face of implacable opposition from the judiciary. When she announced her pregnancy in September 2008 but refused to name the father, the ensuing circus of publicity and speculation was said to have irritated Sarkozy even further.

Last January, five days after the birth of her daughter, Zohra, by caesarean section, Dati was back at work, desperately trying to cling onto her job and incurring the wrath of French feminists who felt she was deliberately undermining their campaign for the extension of maternity rights. “I did what I thought I had to do,” she says now with a shrug of the shoulders. “I was a minister, it was important I returned to work… I didn’t feel pressurised into it – it was a personal decision.”

Within three weeks, Sarkozy, apparently unmoved by her dedication, had dispatched her to Europe. It was seen as a public snub and a demotion. “In French politics, Strasbourg is seen by a lot of politicians as a second choice,” explains Laura Dagg, the editor of an online political magazine in France. “The European parliament is a place where people make their reputation through years and years of hard slog. I think Dati would take any job she could get to get out of there.”

Still, Dati remains loyal to her former mentor – at one point, she even goes so far as to compare Sarkozy with Barack Obama. “He [Sarkozy] didn’t obey the normal rules,” she explains. “He, too, is a self-made man.”

She says she finds her new role as a member of the European parliament extremely stimulating but was recently caught on a French television programme complaining about her job. In a mobile phone conversation with a friend in December, Dati admitted: “I can’t stand it any more,” apparently forgetting that she still had a microphone pinned to her chest.

Today, Dati is more considered. “I have taken on two subjects that interest me [in Europe]: the energy industry and the future of financial regulation. Those are two major subjects in a time of crisis and so those are the two that I chose to immerse myself in.”

Does she still get on well with Sarkozy? “Yes. We see each other, we talk about European issues. It’s the political life.” And what about his wife, the former supermodel Carla Bruni, with whom relations are rumoured to be less friendly? For the first time in our conversation, Dati stumbles slightly over her words. “Er, he’s the head of state, his private life is no one’s business.”

Her attitude to her own privacy is similarly crisp. Dati continues to conceal the identity of Zohra’s father, claiming simply that her romantic life is “complicated”. Various candidates have been touted, including Henri Proglio, the 60-year-old general director of electricity giant EDF and the casino hotel chief Dominique Desseigne. The former Spanish prime minister, José Maria Aznar, took the highly unusual step of issuing a denial after his name was mentioned as the possible father.

Motherhood, Dati says, has not “affected” her, but has simply made her happier. “It’s not that I was sad before, [it's that] the child, my daughter, is one happiness more,” she says and it is true that whenever the one-year-old Zohra is mentioned, Dati cannot help breaking into a smile. What is Zohra like? “Well,” she laughs, “she’s certainly lively.” Her only sadness comes from the knowledge that her own mother, who died nine years ago, was not alive to meet her granddaughter. “When I lost my mother I felt I lost the person I loved most in the world… The way a mother looks at her child is different from the way a father does.”

It is unclear quite what she means by this, but there is a slight suggestion of distance between Dati and her one surviving parent. In a “tell-all” book published last year, Dati’s brother Jamal claimed that his sister had “brought shame on her strictly Muslim family” by having a child out of wedlock. Was it difficult for her father to accept her pregnancy? “That’s a personal issue that concerns my private life, my family and no one else,” Dati replies, her voice level and smooth. “We are a united, solid family and what happens behind closed doors is entirely between us.

“I hope my father is proud of me. But, at the same time, it is not so much a question of pride between us, it is a question of values. I think he is very happy that we have not totally abandoned his values.”

In the end, it is difficult not to admire Dati for her unswerving determination to achieve what she sets out to do and her refusal to apologise to anyone for how she does it. Unlike many politicians, she appears sincere and the guardedness that comes when she refuses to answer the occasional question is, perhaps, the product of not wanting to say something that she does not truly believe, rather than any deliberate coldness of manner or desire to obfuscate the truth. “I come from the principle that you should start off trusting people,” she says. “You might be disappointed but then you deal with the consequences, because if you don’t trust in the first place, you will never move forward.”

The interview is drawing to a close and Dati is being ushered into a different room for photographs. It is a task she takes to with consummate and practised ease, sitting with the straight-backed poise of a ballerina on a velvet-upholstered armchair, her stiletto boots carefully placed within shot. She seems warmer and more relaxed having her picture taken than answering questions, laughing easily and making jokes with her assistant. “I adore these heels,” she says at one point with girlish glee. “If I could sleep in them, I would.” After several more minutes posing professionally for the camera, Dati stands up to leave. She extends a handshake and a glossy smile and then totters elegantly out of the room, the leather of her trousers swishing softly as she goes.