Mr Seguin's rise is all the more surprising because he has opposed EU
integration and liberal economics
BY ONE of history's little ironies, President Jacques Chirac dissolved the French parliament on Philippe Seguin's 54th birthday. That decision - opposed by Mr Seguin at the time - yesterday propelled the former speaker of parliament to the leadership of Mr Chirac's party, the Rally for the Republic (RPR), and established the maverick Gaullist as a likely rival to Mr Chirac for the presidency in 2002.
Five weeks after its June 1st election defeat, the RPR has bowed to the inevitable. Mr Seguin is the right's most popular politician; if he had not succeeded the former prime minister, Mr Alain Juppe, as party president, the movement created by Mr Chirac in 1976 would have been doomed. Mr Seguin's rise is all the more surprising because he has opposed party barons on the two most important issues in France: European integration and liberal economics.
Supported only by the former interior minister, Mr Charles Pasqua, Mr Seguin led a one-man crusade against the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. In an impassioned, 2 hour speech in parliament, during which he used the word "France" 70 times, Mr Seguin argued that Maastricht abandoned French sovereignty and was against the constitution. Europe was being created "without its people ... on tip-toe, in the secrecy of offices, in shadowy commissions". The "Europe of technocrats" would dilute the very concept of French nationhood. "The nation possesses an emotional and spiritual dimension," he said. "It is the product of a mysterious metamorphosis through which a people become more than a community, almost a body and soul."
That speech, in May 1992, marked the real birth of Mr Seguin's political career. Throughout the summer that followed, he criss-crossed France, urging voters to turn out for the referendum. His campaign against Maastricht culminated in a televised debate against President Francois Mitterrand in September. He had an effect in June, opinion polls showed 65 per cent of French people supported Maastricht; only 51.05 per cent voted "yes in September 1992.
The RPR was embarrassed by Mr Seguin's Euroscepticism and for the most part ignored it. In the recent election campaign, Mr Seguin said he had not changed his mind about Maastricht. "But the French people have spoken."
Mr Seguin's political rivals have often accused him of having more in common with the left than with his own centre-right party. For Mr Seguin, Gaullism is not a right-wing ideology, but a means of uniting all Frenchmen under a strong state with stable institutions. Since 1985, he has repeatedly denounced the RPR's "drift to the right".
Alain Juppe and Philippe Seguin are the Cain and Abel of the Gaullist "family" Mr Juppe once told journalists that their rivalry was "ordained by the stars". So the new party leader must have savoured his fallen predecessor's words when he asked the party faithful to unite around Mr Seguin yesterday.
Slim from swimming and jogging, Mr Juppe has always been seen as a cold, arrogant technocrat. Only three years his senior, Mr Seguin looks much older. He is overweight, chain smokes filterless Gitanes cigarettes and has been known to throw files out of windows in fits of temper.
But the French like Seguin's Mediterranean character. He was born in Tunisia, to a family that emigrated from France two generations earlier. His father volunteered for a Tunisian regiment in the second World War and was killed in eastern France when Philippe was only a year old. When he was 12, Mr Seguin's mother remarried and moved to the south of France, where her son worked his way through university as a journalist on local newspapers.
From his childhood, Mr Seguin retained his Catholic faith, a passion for history - especially Napoleon and de Gaulle - and a sense of precariousness. His grandparents left Tunisia when the colony gained independence. "For l3 years," he has said, "I was assured that Tunisia was French and would remain so, then that the French who wanted to could stay there ... and one fine morning there was nothing left."
