From fallen leader to comeback kid
France’s Alain Juppé emerges as contender for presidency
HE HAS a criminal record for corruption and as prime minister in the 1990s caused France’s worst unrest since May 1968 with a failed austerity push.
Two decades on, opinion polls show he is the country’s most respected politician in office.
Forget Nicolas Sarkozy – France’s real comeback story is Alain Juppé, who at 69 has gradually emerged as a serious conservative candidate for the presidency in 2017.
Quite how a politician hitting 70 and with such a chequered past can be a contender to lead a G7 industrial nation puzzles many. Yet it speaks volumes about the lack of public faith in the younger generation of leaders from left and right who seem unable to halt the slow decline in France’s fortunes.
Mr Juppé’s window of opportunity for the Elysee Palace has been opened both by the recordlow popularity of its present occupant, Socialist François Hol- lande, and the lingering aversion of many French to conservative former president Mr Sarkozy, who came out of retirement last month to prepare to campaign for a new term.
That has allowed
Mr
Juppé, currently mayor of the southwest city of Bordeaux, to portray himself as best-placed to win over enough middle-of-the-road voters to ward off the presidential bid of the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen.
Among the policies he advocates are freeing France from what he calls the “straitjacket” of the 35-hour working week; a rise in the statutory age of retirement from 62 to 65, and a reduction in the headcount of France’s huge public sector.
For now, such reform plans do not seem to put off the French.
An Ifop poll published in Paris Match magazine this month found 63 per cent had a “good opinion” of Mr Juppé, the highest rating for any politician currently in office.
Crucially, a separate survey by polling group LH2 this month suggested for the first time that he would beat Mr Sarkozy in the run-off due next year for the
ticket of their UMP presidential party.
“It suggests the return of the ex-president [Sarkozy] is not working the wonders it was expected to – perhaps even that he is being harmed by legal affairs hanging over him,” LH2 noted.
Mr Sarkozy is involved in a series of corruption and other cases but has denied all wrongdoing.
Mr Juppé, the son of agricultural landowners from the south-west, had a meteoric rise as a brilliant young technocrat and an equally humiliating fall.
Ex-president Jacques Chirac described him as “the best among us” and named him prime minister in his 1995 cabinet. But his attempts to reform France’s welfare state were swiftly abandoned after a general strike paralysed the country. Two years later, he was swept out of power by rival Socialists.
Mr Juppé retreated to Bordeaux as mayor but in 2004 was handed a suspended jail sentence for abuse of public funds after the conservative RPR party was found to be illegally using Paris city hall staff for operations while he was party leader.
Supporters say he was a fall guy for practices that were widespread at the time.
Long written off as a has-been, he has used his post as mayor one of France’s biggest cities to show he is in touch with ordinary people, and has brushed off his troubled past with a sense of humour that belies his former reputation for arrogance.
“In politics, you’re never finished for good – just look at me,” he noted this year in a quip that won him the French Press Club’s first prize for political humour.
However, Mr Juppé still has detractors. While former mentor Mr Chirac has backed him, his formidable wife, Bernadette, has come out in favour of Mr Sarkozy and publicly criticised Mr Juppé as “cold, very cold”.