Scandal over Tunisia ties ‘fells’ minister

AFP/Paris

"While I do not feel that I have committed any wrongdoing, I have ... decided to leave my job as foreign minister,” Alliot-Marie wrote in her resignation letter to President Nicolas Sarkozy, a copy of which was seen by AFP.

"I ask you to accept my resignation,” she wrote in the letter which begins with a handwritten "Dear Nicolas.”

"Since several weeks, I have been the target of political attacks and then in the media, using, to create suspicion, counter-truths and generalisations,” wrote Alliot-Marie, who was named France’s first woman foreign minister in December.

"For the last two weeks, it is my family’s private life that has been suffering real harassment at the hands of certain media (and) I cannot accept that some people use this cabal to try to make people believe in a weakening of France’s international policy.”

"I have too much consideration for politics in the service of France to accept being used as a pretext for such an operation (and) I have too much loyalty to and friendship for you to accept that your international action could in any way suffer from it.”

MAM, as she is universally known, became embroiled in recent weeks in a series of scandals over her controversial links to Tunisia, where she took a holiday during its popular uprising.

Subsequent revelations about her and her family’s links to the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and her offer for France to help riot police quell the uprising there, made her position increasingly untenable.

It emerged that she had holidayed in the former French colony during the uprising, using the private jet of a businessman allegedly linked to Ben Ali’s regime, from whom her parents also bought a stake in a company.

Faced with rising criticism, she fatefully said: "When I am on holiday, I am not foreign minister.”

Nevertheless, when she took over the job from former left-wing humanitarian Bernard Kouchner in November, she was considered a highly experienced politician whose task it was to redress French diplomacy after Kouchner’s occasionally emotional and instinctive time in office.

Alliot-Marie, 64, had a good track record after successively holding the portfolios of defence (2002-2007) – the first woman to do so – as well as interior (2007-2009) and justice (2009-2010).

In another first, she and her "life partner” Patrick Ollier became the first couple to sit together in a French cabinet, when he was named minister of parliamentary affairs at the same time as she became foreign minister.

As defence minister, she travelled to some of the world’s most sensitive hot-spots, where her "army-cut” trousers drew humorists’ jibes, as did her occasionally wooden speech.

But she won the respect of the country’s top brass – traveling extensively to view French troop deployments in Afghanistan, the Balkans and Africa.

She was also credited with persuading a military establishment that is highly loyal to the nation state to pool resources inside a European defence structure.

Born in 1946 into a traditional Gaullist family, Alliot-Marie imbibed politics from an early age and was introduced to her future mentor Jacques Chirac by her father, who was a member of parliament, mayor of the southwestern resort of Biarritz and an international rugby referee.

After training as a lawyer, she worked in the backrooms of Chirac’s Rally for the Republic (RPR) party before winning a seat in the National Assembly in 1986.

The same year she won her first ministerial post as secretary of state for education under Chirac’s premiership.

Alliot-Marie overcame the misogyny prevailing in the clubby world of Gaullist politics by sheer force of personality and constant networking around the country.

But MAM is pilloried in the left-wing press as a classic member of the Catholic bourgeoisie, with her smart suits and neat hair.

And she is certainly no conventional feminist, pointedly refusing to call herself "la ministre” – with the feminine article – preferring instead the more correct "le”.