Voting with their feet
It’s all very well to pluck someone from the immigrant-filled estates and put them in government, it’s very decent to want to give people with west or north African roots a chance in a “civilised” society, but you’ve got to make sure first that they are the right person. Nicolas Sarkozy doesn’t seem very good at choosing the right person – or rather he chooses people for the wrong reason, like Dominique Strauss-Kahn, chosen as a candidate for the IMF because Sarkozy wants to scatter the Socialist heavyweights into as many separate and distant corners as he can. But more glaring may be the mistake he appears to have made over Rachida Dati.
It seemed such a bold move, to make someone from the ghetto estates Minister of Justice, but he appointed her not for her merits (though she has many), not for the greater good of French justice but so that everyone would talk about him. Of course it worked – but sooner or later a minister of Justice has to do a job. Sarkozy handed her a ready-made law which he has been trying to get passed for a couple of years on minimum sentencing and treating recidivist minors as adults. She is doing her best to get it through parliament, but she does not have the necessary experience of that sort of work. How on earth could she have? After studying economics and public law at university, she worked in the accountancy department of the oil company Elf, while continuing her studies in economics and management. She worked in the audit department of Matra and then for the European Bank of Research and Development. She left there to work for the Lyonnaise des Eaux as a controller of management and general secretary in their project development office.
In 1997, after ten years in these different accounting and managerial posts, she enrolled for the 2 year course at the Ecole nationale de la magistrature. This is not to study law in the English or American sense, but the law connected with being an examining magistrate, a role in England done by the police. Basically it involves looking at a crime and deciding whether there is a case to answer, and if there is, assembling all the evidence to make a convincing court case. She graduated from there and spent four years working her way up through the courts first as an auditrice de justice, then as a juge commissaire and finally as a deputy prosecutor. Apparently she was not enamoured of a career as a magistrate because in 2003 she offered her services instead to Nicolas Sarkozy.
I first came across her in April 2006, when I asked Sarkozy’s press office if I could interview her for a Prospect article about the troubled immigrant estates 6 months after the November 2005 riots. Less of an interview, more of a chat with someone from those estates who has obviously succeeded, is how I put it to the press office. I had high hopes of getting it, having done a relatively flattering portrait of Sarkozy a short while before. But no, the request was turned down. It was suggested to me that Mme Dati was not ready for interviews (perhaps was not the type, she was after all, only an advisor) – in fact I don’t think anyone had interviewed her, and it was too much to ask her to start with the foreign press, even though she would have had handlers. So I was surprised when, just a short year later, Sarkozy made her Minister of Justice, where giving interviews would be the least of her problems.
In my post of the 5th July I said that Mme Dati was that day debating the law on minimum sentencing in the Senate. It was her very first experience of parliament – she is not elected, indeed given there are no members of the French parliament with a north or west African background, she probably wouldn’t have been elected even if she had stood – but in France you can be a minister without having gone through the hard and often humiliating experience of trying to persuade strangers to vote for you. On that day she defended her law capably, although the photograph of her in Saturday’s Le Monde [not on the web version] showed her speaking to an empty chamber – perhaps 15 people were present. Everyone knew it was a law which a majority of magistrates do not want because it seems to take judgement out of their hands. For that and other reasons it was seriously mauled by that lion of French Justice, the Socialist Robert Badinter. Badinter was the minister of Justice responsible for pushing through the anti-death sentence law back in 1981. At nearly 80 there are few things he has not seen, and with over 25 years experience in politics after a successful career as a barrister he knows a thing or two about laws good, bad and indifferent. This one, he said in the senate, is useless, vexatious and potentially dangerous.
The next day the director of Mme Dati’s cabinet, Michel Dobkine, resigned. The director of a minister’s cabinet, often an énarque, is the civil servant who runs them. They are very senior and very important. Mme Dati had not chosen M. Dobkine and it may be that she wanted to choose someone she knew. He said he was resigning for personal reasons. One paper said that he was separating from his wife and could not give his whole attention to his job. Another said that pro-Dati people in the ministry had criticised him for going to pick up one of his children from school at 5.00 o’clock. I wondered whether if a mother did that she would be criticised – equality of the sexes has to work both ways.
Whatever the true reasons, yesterday three more senior advisors from her cabinet resigned – they did not give personal reasons. They did not have to – it is now accepted that Mme Dati is difficult to work with.
I see nothing wrong with that, except that Mme Dati knows next to nothing about the job she is doing, having had a minimum of experience in law and no experience in politics. Being Minister of Justice is a mighty job, being “difficult” in it when you don’t know what you’re doing is dangerous. Given that the new president wants to reform the law, and justice, he would have been better advised to choose someone as minister who understood both the law and how to reform it creatively, who also had the talent or experience to get those reforms accepted by people working in the profession. It would be rather like Gordon Brown asking a young Indian woman who had experience in one of the important but secondary medical spheres, with no experience of Parliament, to be Minister of Health and reform the NHS. However hard-working, ambitious and even intelligent the person, her chances of doing a good, lasting job would be minimal. If on top of that she threw her weight around in a dictatorial way, the result would almost certainly be catastrophic. The difference is that in Britain ministers are responsible to Parliament and thus the people, whereas under the 5th Constitution in France, ministers are responsible only to the president. They are bound to do his will. That is all Rachida Dati is there for. If you watch her listening to Badinter’s arguments in the Senate criticising her bill you may see that.