Rebel with a cause

FRENCH POLITICS:Rama Yade was the youngest ever French government minister when she was appointed by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. Often criticised for her rebellious streak, she's no longer a minister, but she hasn't given up on her ambition to overhaul French politics, she tells RUADHAN MAC CORMAIC,Paris Correspondent

N THE DAY that Nicolas Sarkozy made 30-year-old Rama Yade the youngest government minister in the history of the current French Republic, he took her aside and said something that struck her as odd. “You don’t have the right to fail,” Sarkozy told her.

“So the others have the right to fail?” she asked.

“Alas,” came the reply.

“But he was right. I didn’t understand at the time, but he was right.”

The theme of Sarkozy’s campaign in 2007 was la rupture, a term that managed the elegant campaign trick – to be pulled off with panache by an unfancied US senator a year later – of summing up the project and the person in a single word. Sarkozy promised to shake up France’s way of doing things, but a fairly empty slogan somehow gained weight coming from someone who, it was tacitly understood, was une rupture.

Once elected, Sarkozy appointed a government heavy on the same symbolism. Ideological enmities were buried by co-opting leading left-wingers. Bright sparks were promoted. But the world media’s gaze lingered on three women. In a family photograph dominated by middle-aged white men, Rama Yade, Rachida Dati and Fadela Amara – each the child of African immigrants – stood out, and the press seized on them as embodiments of wider changes. Sarkozy, who two years earlier had set off a storm by vowing to take a power-hose to the “scum” causing trouble in the immigrant suburbs, basked in the applause.

Four years later, none of the three remains in government. Dati, the most high-profile, has been exiled to the relative obscurity of the European Parliament. Amara has withdrawn from public view since leaving cabinet last November. But the woman who was in 2007 the least known of the trio – Rama Yade – is now one of the most recognisable public figures in France. She is consistently voted one of the most popular politicians in the country (the old rogue Jacques Chirac usually tops the list), and every magazine editor knows that her face on the cover guarantees a bounce in sales. She was removed from cabinet in a reshuffle last November, but as France’s ambassador to Unesco, the UN’s culture and education agency, she still enjoys a platform and an audience.

And yet for all the public acclaim, the woman known as the arch rebel of Sarkozy’s government is plainly not at Unesco by choice. Yade denies it, but it’s an open secret that she annoyed Sarkozy, her most ardent champion in 2007, once too often. A few days after we met, Yade officially resigned from Sarkozy’s UMP party and joined the centrist Parti Radical, led by another disaffected former cabinet minister. Rumours have been circulating that Sarkozy, fed up with Yade’s persistent sniping at government policy, might sack his former protege from the Unesco job less than six months after appointing her. The spotlight remains undimmed; rarely a day passes without another story, another piece of high theatre to feed the public appetite for more Rama Yade.

“He didn’t need me at a given moment,” she says, sitting in her office in the Unesco building on a bright midweek afternoon. “I’m not going to make a drama out of it. I’m not one of those people who goes on television and says, ‘Oh my God, it’s terrible, I’m no longer in government.’ That’s life.”

Not that she doesn’t cherish the memories. “There were a lot of special moments. The first time at the United Nations security council. There are only five of us – Condoleezza Rice and people like that, sitting around a little table, and me behind a sign that said ‘France’. I was 30. That was something. It was extraordinary.”

Yade (34) was born in Dakar to Senegalese parents. Her father is a diplomat, her mother a teacher, and Yade moved to Paris at the age of 10 when her father was posted here. He later returned to Senegal, where he now lives with a new family, but Yade and her mother stayed on in Paris and moved into a council house in the western suburb of Colombes. “We moved from the status of expatriates to that of immigrants, with all the difficulties that entails. But we fought to get out of that,” she says.

Yade followed the classic route into the French elite – classe prépa, Sciences Po, then the civil service exam. “For a long time I didn’t know what I wanted to do. My mother didn’t really like the ideas I had for a career. I wanted to become a writer. She thought it wasn’t very secure. Later I wanted to be a lawyer; she said the same thing. Then I wanted to become an elite sports player. I played basketball an awful lot, but she told me to stop and focus on my studies. So with everything ruled out, I no longer knew what to do.”

An internship at the senate led to a permanent job there, but she maintains she never gave a thought to politics as a career. “I hadn’t voted much,” she says. “I watched it a lot, but I didn’t like politics as it was. It was always the same people saying the same things.”

Yade has written three books of political ideas, and in the most recent – an open letter to France’s young people – she describes herself as belonging to the “generation of April 21st, 2002”. That was the day when Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, shook France’s political establishment by qualifying for a presidential run-off against Jacques Chirac. Rama Yade was 23, just out of college. She reckons that day marked a generation determined not to “have the National Front’s pistol at our temple”.

“I said to myself, ‘You can’t stay on the couch, criticising what you see on television. You have to get involved.’ ” The final straw came in 2005, after a fire on the boulevard Vincent-Auriol in Paris killed 17 people, among them 14 children of Malian origin. “I sensed a sort of indifference towards what happened, and that shocked me. I got involved to stop complaining. I wanted to try, so as not to have regrets, so as not to end up saying, ‘I spent my life criticising but I didn’t dare get involved’.”

Yade’s public appeal is hardly a mystery. Intelligent, articulate and photogenic, she manages to project passion for the job while cultivating the image of an outsider alive to the ironies and absurdities of life in politics. In France, as in Ireland, young politicians tend to speak and act much older than they are. Yade makes a virtue of being a young, self-aware woman in a line of work where such things make you a rarity. She is a Muslim in a right-wing party, but she was educated in Catholic schools, her husband is Jewish and some of her loudest fans are on the left. Above all, in a country that loves a rebel, her penchant of being outspoken is prized.

As minister for human rights, Yade’s best-remembered moment occurred when Col Muammar Gadafy was granted a lavish reception in Paris in 2007. The Libyan leader arrived on December 10th – International Human Rights Day – and Yade welcomed him by remarking “that our country is not a doormat on which a leader, terrorist or not, can come and wipe the blood off his feet”. Sarkozy was furious. Bernard Kouchner, then foreign minister, said creating a human-rights ministry was in hindsight “an error”.

“It brings me more trouble than anything else,” she says of the rebel tag routinely appended to her name. “I’d be much more comfortable if I said nothing and did nothing. There are some who follow that strategy. Say nothing. But were we elected for that? To do nothing? I got involved in politics to move things forward, not to remain hidden.”

Yade was demoted to the post of junior minister for sport, where one of her successes was winning the hosting rights to Euro 2016 for France. But, her gift for drawing attention to herself intact, she set off another row by criticising the national football team for staying in a luxury five-star hotel during the World Cup in South Africa. When Sarkozy reshuffled his cabinet last November, Yade was finally shown the door and offered the Unesco post to soften the blow.

Being Muslim and the only black minister in Sarkozy’s government – and half the age of some of her fellow ministers, at that – Yade knew she would face more scrutiny than most of her colleagues. But she seems surprised by the intensity of it. “I have the sense sometimes that the French people are watching me like the object of an experiment. Will she succeed or not? Will it work? To see whether others will be able to do it, other women, working-class people, those from immigrant backgrounds, young people. All of that is being tested.”

She admits to feeling pressure, and says it didn’t take long for her to realise what Sarkozy meant when he told her she didn’t have the right to fail. “The experimental aspect. I had to succeed, because if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be renewed for others. That’s what happened.

“Every time I did anything, everyone talked about it. Other people did things and nobody talked about. I’d say to myself sometimes, ‘I’d like to be in their shoes. Peace.’ Sometimes I would have liked it. I felt, they’re not constantly being judged. I’m not trying to victimise myself. I’m not a victim. I’m not complaining. But I’m aware of my strengths and my weaknesses. I didn’t want to be used by the media or by the rest of the political class.”

To her sharpest critics – including many in her own party – Yade is lazy, naive, selfish. Her interventions on Gadafy and the football team served no purpose other than to burnish her own credentials as a maverick. She is also criticised for having the best of both worlds, casting herself as an outsider while accruing the benefits of her ties to the ruling party.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Yade likened the milestone to the fall of the Berlin Wall, though she says her happiness for Obama and the Americans was tinged with a little sadness that France had been beaten to it. Asked whether France is ready for a black president, she guffaws at first and theatrically slumps her tall frame into the swivel chair. “I think the French are ready. The political system is not. It’s closed . . . Our legitimacy is always contested. There are still people who think I have no place in politics, that when I was a minister, I was taking someone’s place.

“The parties have to open up, unlock themselves. I feel alone. There aren’t many like me. I can’t think of a second name.” There’s a pause, as we both try to come up with one. “Anyway.”

But wasn’t the same thing said in the US until 2008? “Yes, but there an actor can be president!” she laughs. “Not possible here. Here, you have to stand four times, you have to have done 40 years in politics, have been a deputy, a senator, a minister, all that, before thinking of being president. It’s very hard.”

Rama Yade’s departure from government seems not to have made her any less ubiquitous. She has set up her own think-tank and spends a lot of time travelling around the country to meet supporters. Her ambition is to win a seat next year in the national assembly or senate, or at least that’s “the ambition that would allow me to have other ambitions”.

At 34, Rama Yade must know she is fighting to avoid having to confront the contingency that Nicolas Sarkozy whispered in her ear that summer’s day back in 2007. To prove that this is a beginning rather than an end. Looking back over the past four years, she refuses to entertain a smidgen of regret.

“What do you want me to regret? I never did things by accident or on a whim.” Take her criticism of the footballers, she says. “That was even worse than I thought. They ended up in a locked bus, refusing to play! It was worse than I thought. Libya? Gadafy? The question is, did I go far enough? It’s never, ‘Do I regret what I did?’ It’s ‘Did I do enough?’ ”

When we finish, she unwraps a parcel of books and lays them out on the desk. A literary prize has recruited her as a judge, and she sounds excited about immersing herself in the reading. “If I was to do something else, it would be writing. Looking at the world critically. Looking at the world and saying what I think.” Naturally.