Rachida Dati's appointment as French justice minister was a stroke of political genius by president Nicolas Sarkozy. A trained lawyer and magistrate, she is also young, female, from an underprivileged background and a member of France's largest minority. She is not, however, Cinderella, she assures Lara Marlowe
France celebrates Bastille Day today in a mood of upbeat anticipation, two months into the political, social and economic "rupture" promised by President Nicolas Sarkozy. All EU members have been invited to send contingents to the traditional military parade down the Champs-Élysées. It will be followed by La Garden Party at the Élysée Palace, which Sarkozy has dedicated "to victims and all those who have gone through trials" as well as "those who have committed acts of bravery". This evening, France's new leader has organised a free concert with pop stars on the Champ-de-Mars, beneath the Eiffel Tower, "in honour of France and Europe".
In a recent speech to right-wing parliamentarians, Sarkozy said: "We must start over. We need a revolution in mentalities, in behaviour, in methods." Just a few months ago, France was said to be on the verge of a collective nervous breakdown. Fortunately for Sarkozy, unemployment was falling and consumer confidence rising just at the time he took office. The interminable power struggle on the left, the parliamentary majority of the right-wing UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) and Sarkozy's extraordinary energy have cleared an open boulevard for the new president's "revolution".
Rachida Dati, the justice minister whom he appointed in May, is emblematic of the new, young, and often female blood that Sarkozy has injected into the stodgy upper echelons of French power. Taking a cue from Sarkozy, who held his own Bastille Day garden party in his previous life as interior minister, Dati yesterday staged a "garden party of European justice", to which she invited her European and Mediterranean basin counterparts.
Dati is projecting forward to the French presidency of the EU, which will start in July 2008. She has sent out feelers on establishing an "enhanced cooperation" group to build a more integrated "European judiciary space". She says joint investigations, link-ups between criminal records systems and the European arrest warrant are already bringing this "judiciary space" to life. By extending the list of judicial matters that can be decided by a qualified majority (rather than unanimously), Dati says the "reform treaty" agreed in Brussels last month took the "judiciary space" much further. Like Sarkozy, Dati rejects the permissive, individualistic ideology of the May 1968 student revolt, which dominated French life for the past 40 years. Like Sarkozy, she is the daughter of immigrants. "If my values and convictions are right-wing, so be it," she says. "I believe in work, effort and merit. I have always rejected hand-outs."
What makes her tick? "The will to do things well." No wonder Dati is sometimes referred to as "a little Sarkozy". She takes the comparison as a compliment.
Dati's extraordinary trajectory, from the housing projects of Chalon-sur-Sâone to the majestic Place Vendôme, has become France's favourite Republican fairytale, though Dati dislikes being portrayed in this way. After her appointment, she prevented Paris Matchfrom publishing childhood photographs which the magazine obtained under false pretences. "My life is not a novel," she insists. "There is nothing mysterious or romantic about it. I am not Cinderella."
Twenty years have passed since an earlier right-wing justice minister named Albin Chalandon invited Dati to lunch at the justice ministry, next door to the Ritz Hotel. He'd been bowled over by the petite, black-haired, 21-year-old who rushed up to him at an Algerian embassy reception. Dati worked as a night nurse's aide in Dijon then, to pay for her studies in law and economics. Chalandon became the first of several influential mentors. When she took office on May 18th, she brought Chalandon, now 87, with her.
The day before Dati took office, another close friend, the former health minister and former president of the European Parliament, Simone Veil, gave her a pair of gold and pearl ear-rings.
"At every important step in my life, she gives me something of her own," Dati explains. Veil had encouraged Dati to attend the École Nationale de la Magistrature, and gave the young woman her own magistrate's robe when she graduated. "Something ties me to her," Dati continues. "We were already very close, and the death of my mother [from cancer in 2001] brought us closer. She knows what it's like to lose one's mother in painful circumstances." Veil's family perished in the Nazi holocaust against the Jews.
Today, I am Dati's guest for lunch in her vast office overlooking the ministry's garden. The grandeur of the room - a blur of tapestries, gilded mirrors and chandeliers - befits the "keeper of the seals", as the justice minister is known. The seal which finalised the abolition of the death penalty stands near her desk. We are four women at table: Dati, her press attaché and her adviser for European affairs. The men who serve spicy shrimp, sauteed tuna with vegetables, Godiva chocolates and coffee, glide silently over the thick Aubusson carpets, never interrupting our conversation.
If Dati's life story were not so well known, one would assume this attractive, well-groomed woman was a grande bourgeoise, perhaps an ambassador's wife or daughter. Instead, the nickname "Sarcosette" (referring also to Victor Hugo's street waif, Cosette), coined by the satirical weekly Canard enchaîné, sticks to her.
Dati's mother Zohra, from Tlemcen, Algeria, and her father Mbarek, from Casa Blanca, Morocco, arrived in a wave of north African Arab emigration in 1963. Zohra Dati stayed home to raise the couple's 12 children. Mbarek worked as a mason, then in the Saint Gobain glass factory. The odds that their second child, Rachida, would become France's minister of justice were less than zero.
Dati's appointment was a stroke of political genius by Sarkozy. Not only is she young, female, from an underprivileged background and a member of France's largest minority; she is a trained lawyer and magistrate who served for several years as a judge before becoming Sarkozy's adviser on the prevention of delinquency and "difficult neighbourhoods" at the interior ministry.
Seven months ago, no one had heard of Dati. On January 14th, the day of his investiture as presidential candidate for the UMP party, Sarkozy followed his wife Cecilia's advice and made her a spokeswoman for his campaign. Her dazzling smile and ferocious debating style made her an instant favourite of radio and television stations.
Dati still starts many of her sentences with the words "Nicolas Sarkozy says . . ." or "Nicolas Sarkozy thinks . . ." When she talks about him, she is warm and cheerful. She admits to weeping when Sarkozy told her, after his election, that he would make her minister of justice. "Whatever post he offered me would have been fine," she says. "Because my relationship with him is founded on respect and confidence. If I didn't have this confidence [in him] there would be no point."
But when you ask Dati about her past role in enforcing an education ministry circular against the Islamic headscarf, or Sarkozy's remarks on the slaughtering of sheep in bathtubs and polygamy - deemed racist by some French Muslims - or the despair of France's immigrant suburbs, she seems to think you've stereotyped her. She becomes cold as dry ice, and delivers cryptic, clipped replies.
It is Dati's iron will that strikes you most. Her brother Omar explained it this way, in an interview with Le Parisiennewspaper: "My sister never gives up on anything . . . When she decided something, she never changed her mind. She is very intransigent in the way she takes decisions. My sister is not a flexible girl; she likes to decide alone."
Dati's father enrolled her and her sister Malika at Le Devoir, a Catholic girls' school run by nuns in Chalon. Does she consider herself to be of Muslim and Catholic culture? I ask her. "I consider myself to be of French culture," she replies. Is it true, as Le Pointmagazine reported, that she fasts during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan? "I never said that. I am of French culture. I never expressed myself on religion or my private life."
For a self-made woman like Dati, it must be maddening to be asked constantly to repeat her own story: how as a child she dealt with the social security and housing authorities on behalf of her illiterate parents, how she virtually raised her 11 brothers and sisters, became an Avon lady at the age of 14 to earn money . . .
It's difficult to talk about her late mother, Dati says: "She was my most beautiful story, yes. First of all, it's a story about a mother and daughter. But life made it more than that; it became something else. She was a woman who loved life, and unfortunately left too soon. I learned so much from her, in terms of energy, in terms of not giving up . . ."
Dati says she had no defined ambition as a child. "I just wanted to have a . . ." She pauses to search for the word: "a pacified life, that is to say not to be always in difficulties, under tension. I wanted to have the life I chose over time. Looking back on it, even when I was young, I always decided what I wanted to do. And the things I didn't want to do, I didn't do them."
Her reluctance to recount her upbringing "is also a question of respect for this ministry and the mission I have as 'keeper of the seals'," Dati says. But it is extraordinary for the daughter of Arab immigrants to have reached such a position, I protest. "You can say it's extraordinary, yes," she muses. "I didn't choose my life . . ." But she did, I interrupt her; she created the life she wanted to have. "Yes," she replies. "But it was always a struggle. At some point you want to lay down your arms." And has she done so now? "Yes. Perhaps one can say yes. That is another part of my life."
On the last day of the legislative campaign, Dati, who had by that time been justice minister for a month, was the star speaker at a UMP rally in the immigrant suburb of Vaulx-en-Velin, near Lyon. "When I see you, I read a part of my life on your faces," she addressed the young crowd. "I know the frustrations that can lead to anger. I made a commitment to Nicolas Sarkozy. He had confidence in my ability. During the campaign, how many times I heard people say I was 'the token Arab', or 'the alibi'. Well you have proof that Nicolas Sarkozy keeps his promises. Making me 'keeper of the seals' was a symbolic act that opened the way for others."
Though Dati agrees with Sarkozy's proposal for "French-style positive discrimination", she says it can only be based on social criteria, such as family revenue or the neighbourhood one lives in. Unlike affirmative action in the US, "it cannot be done according to ethnic criteria. Because that would provoke another form of inequality."
Dati's appointment was universally praised, as were Sarkozy's choices of Rama Yade, a Senate aide of Senegalese origin, as junior minister for human rights at the foreign ministry, and Fadela Amara, a campaigner for women's rights of Algerian origin, to be junior minister for urban policy.
"I see the effect in the banlieues of Rachida Dati's nomination to the justice ministry," Manuel Valls, the socialist mayor of the Paris suburb of Évry (where Dati once served as deputy prosecutor) said on television during the June legislative campaign. "We didn't know how to open up to these Francais de la diversité."
Francais de la diversité is the French euphemism for ethic minorities, who represent more than 10 per cent of the population. The last two right-wing governments made feeble attempts at window-dressing, making two Beurs (slang for Arabs) powerless junior ministers. Never before has a member of a minority occupied a position of genuine power in France.
As minister of the interior, Sarkozy had a tense relationship with the banlieues, because he called juvenile delinquents "scum" and promised to clean the immigrant suburbs with a "Karcher" power hose. Though she dislikes being assigned to "Arab" issues, Dati tried to repair the damage by promoting "Bleu Blanc Rouge", an association of young Arab French people that supports Sarkozy. She tried, but failed, to organise Sarkozy's return to the Paris suburb of Argenteuil, where he spoke of "scum".
The expression "Black Blanc Beur" (black, white and Arab), came into usage at the time of France's 1998 World cup victory, to describe a multi-racial society. But the dream seemed to wither and nearly died in three weeks of race riots in November 2005. Sarkozy's election may have revived it.
"It's not an impression. It's a reality," Dati says. "Nicolas Sarkozy says France is multi-faceted and doesn't know it. When he sees the high-ranking civil service, the top state institutions, he always says it doesn't resemble today's France."
One of the criticisms levelled against Sarkozy is that he is too active, that he is an American-style "hyper-president" who so dominates the French political scene that there is little oxygen left for anyone else, including his prime minister and cabinet. Though the next presidential election is five years away, Sarkozy seems to have embarked on a permanent campaign. "People say: 'He does everything'," Sarkozy told workers on a construction site recently. "But I wasn't elected to do nothing! . . . For the next five years, I shall continue to go out on the ground, to give, psychologically, energy and confidence."
The meeting of Sarkozy and Dati in 2002 has been described as a collision of two energies. "Perhaps he communicated, transmitted a lot of energy," she says. "I think it's contagious, in the good sense of the word. He makes me want to work."
Dati tries to get away from the Place Vendôme every day. She spent part of her first night as minister visiting Fleury-Mérogis prison, and her first Sunday morning in court in the Paris suburb of Créteil. She says a trip to a centre for juvenile repeat offenders showed her the need for child psychiatrists in detention centres. On another visit, prison guards made her realise the necessity of creating activities for 16-18 year-old prisoners, who otherwise sit in their cells all day doing nothing.
Establishing minimum sentences for repeat offenders and doing away with the "minority excuse" for delinquents under the age of 18 were key measures of Sarkozy's presidential platform. Despite Sarkozy's boasts of combating crime during his long stay at the interior ministry, delinquency among minors has increased 40 per cent in the past five years, and 45 per cent of those accused of violent theft are minors.
As Sarkozy's adviser for the prevention of delinquency, Dati already helped to draw up one law on the subject. The present draft law on repeat offences, which she is defending, is in fact the fifth law to strengthen punishment in as many years. "Minors are responsible for their acts," Dati wrote on the opinion page of Libération newspaper this month. "We must search for a balance, which I admit is difficult to achieve, between the insatiable drive of certain minors and the benefits of a law that forbids...
"Certain minors are not children. We must stop the naivety that too often inspires discourse on juvenile delinquency . . ."
"Teenagers are not adults," countered a petition published by lawyers, magistrates, doctors, social workers and academics in Nouvel Observateur magazine. Dati's move to treat 16- to 18-year-old repeat offenders as adults has raised an outcry. Opponents claim that mandatory minimum sentences violate the principle of individual justice. The draft law gets round this by allowing judges to hand down less than the mandatory minimum sentence, if they justify their decision in writing. Opponents also claim the law would violate the UN convention on the rights of children.
France spends €6.7bn each year on its prison and justice system, which places it 17th out of 27 EU countries. Judges point out that 40 per cent of prison terms of less than one year are never enforced, mainly because there are already 63,600 people in French prisons - 12,000 more than there are room for. Delinquents wait an average of 10 months before appearing in court, while hardened criminals wait three years before coming to trial. "The two priorities," says a magistrate working in a Paris suburb, "must be enforcing sentences and the immediacy of the response."
Yet Dati is not one to give in to criticism. "We have to give a clear sign, a tool, to magistrates who deal with repeat offenders," she says. "This will provide consistent jurisprudence, and sends a strong sign to repeat offenders, who will know what they're risking . . . The statistics for repeat offenders in Paris are terrifying: in the past five years a 360 per cent increase for drugs and a 777 per cent increase on wilful violence. . . If this works for 10 , well we'll have 10 fewer of them."
As required by the UN convention on torture, Dati is establishing an independent controller for prisons. And she intends to build hospital prisons for the 30 per cent of prisoners suffering from psychological disorders.
Like an echo of Sarkozy's Bastille Day garden party dedicated to victims, Dati intends to establish "victims' judges . . . to follow and help the victim in judiciary dealings, once there's a judgment in his or her favour". The problem, she explains, is that "women who are victims of violence, of rape, are often traumatised by what they've been through, and they are afraid to have a verdict carried out." Only Belgium has a similar system.
Dati is also undertaking a major reform of the "judiciary map" - a move to consolidate tribunals and appeals courts and encourage magistrates to specialise in certain types of cases. Because courthouses in isolated areas may be shut down - not unlike post offices and train lines - the move has met resistance. Lawyers demonstrated in several towns, but Dati has so far defused the crisis by engaging in consultation on the reform.
Dati's ageing father Mbarek still cannot believe his daughter is minister of justice. "Right now, every time he sees a lawyers' demonstration, he panics. He thinks they're out to get me, and he's upset."
President Sarkozy's plans to reform France's tax, welfare, immigration and university systems are also moving ahead at speed. They too are fraught with complexity, and face opposition: that is the French way. The president's friendship with billionaires and media barons, and repeated incidents of self-censorship, have raised legitimate concerns about conflict of interest and freedom of the press. Yet despite the reservations, there's a widespread feeling that France must change, and that Sarkozy and ministers like Rachida Dati are the only politicians capable of seeing change through.
Dati keeps working away, from 8am until, as she puts it, "plus infinity" daily. The only things that frighten her, she says, are death and disease. Sexism? "Politics is a violent, brutal milieu," she replies with a smile. Racism? "That's dépassé; otherwise I wouldn't be here." And how did she get past it? "One keeps going," she says. "One keeps going."