Take a look at French newsstands and you will no doubt come across Rachida Dati's face smiling at you. Whether she is pictured leaving a ministerial meeting or posing for a magazine, she maintains the same intensity, radiance and confidence. Rachida Dati is billed as France's Cinderella: The girl who started from nothing and made it to the prestigious post of justice minister against all odds.
She is certainly the poster girl for Sarkozy's government. Through Dati, a woman born of a Moroccan father and an Algerian mother and who holds dual French and Moroccan citizenship, Sarkozy was able to shake off his racist "I will rid you of this scum" image. For the presidential election, he made her one of his two spokespersons. Once he was elected to office, he appointed her his minister of justice, the first person of North African descent to hold such a high office. It was a highly symbolic appointment through which Sarkozy not only guaranteed his place in history but signaled to all that his government was ringing in the changes.
From a PR point of view, Dati has played the role to perfection. The narrative of her life story is played out for us regularly and put forward as proof that in France anybody can make it to the top though hard work and determination. And just like her president, she is the celebrity politician par excellence. She has relentlessly courted the media. She has appeared on television talk shows, posed in a Parisian hotel for a magazine fashion shoot, given regular lengthy interviews to the press and smiled at the paparazzi that snap her at every glittering occasion. No other member of Sarkozy's Cabinet has received so much media attention, with thousands of column inches devoted not so much to her policies as to her choice of shoes and clothes. When Sarkozy attended a state banquet at the White House in his honor, it was Dati who entered at his arm wearing a sumptuous Grege ballgown. The picture was headline news and summed up Dati's meteoric rise to fame.
Rachida Dati was born in November 1965 in Saint Remy, near Lyon. Her father was a Moroccan mason, her mother an Algerian full time mother looking after no less than 12 children. Nothing marked Rachida as having a bright future. She neither excelled at school nor showed an outstanding talent of some kind. What enabled her to rise out of her modest beginnings was sheer will and guts - and hard work. She put herself through school while working as a paramedical assistant. Though she initially sought a career in medicine, she obtained an economics degree and later a law degree.
The thing about Dati is that none of her success is due to her achievements. She has risen not through being good at what she does but through being good at networking. All of her big breaks have come through personal contacts. She is gutsy and determined. She understood early on that her CV alone was not going to get her very far, so she set about meeting people who could help her get ahead. The first such meeting occurred at a reception at the Algerian Embassy where the 21-year- old Dati made a beeline for Albin Chalandon, the then minister of justice. Chalandon became her first mentor and through him she secured a job with Elf-Aquitaine. It was also Chalandon ten years later who enabled her to become a magistrate without passing the entrance exam.
Her life is marked by such meetings, each giving her a step up on her career. When she meets the industrialist Jean-Luc Lagardere at an awards reception, she convinces him to give her a job at Matra Communication; Jacques Attali takes her to London to work for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development for a year; Simone Veil encourages her to become a magistrate; until eventually she meets Nicolas Sarkozy, then minister of the interior with presidential ambitions. She writes him a letter asking to meet him. Sarkozy sees in Dati a woman in his image: Ambitious, determined, plucky, gutsy, hard working and offers her an adviser's job in the Ministry of the Interior. The rest as they say is history.
So should we all be cheering Dati as a modern-day Cinderella? She is as unpopular as she is popular. Many in the North African community voice not just unease about her but downright hostility. She has been accused of selling out her roots, of becoming a pawn in the Sarkozy machine and in so doing betraying her community. Much of that is the criticism that accompanies any woman who breaks out of the life that has been written for her. Dati is independent and free, she writes her own rules and, not surprisingly, her way of being infuriates traditionalists.
She is also unpopular with the white, middle-aged males of her party who feel she is an usurper that she is in a job she is ill qualified to do and which rightfully should have been theirs. Again, that is part and parcel of being someone who breaks the mold. Those who sought the status quo will naturally resent the trailblazer.
What I find more disconcerting about Rachida Dati is that she is not a conviction politician. She has seen through extensive reforms of the French judicial system at break-neck speed with the determination and narrow-mindedness of the bulldozer. She sees her role as that of executing President Sarkozy's ideas as efficiently and ruthlessly as possible. Her authoritarian leadership style has led to 14 members of her ministry resigning in a year.
However, she has gained her place in history, and this week, she has added a second first to her list by announcing that she is expecting a child. Rachida Dati will not be the first unmarried mother to give birth to a child while in office - Segolene Royal the former presidential candidate gave birth to her fourth child while minister for the environment - but she will be the first single mother in office. Dati has refused to name the father of her child. French privacy laws mean the French press is unlikely to reveal the name of the father, but the same does not apply to the foreign media. Not surprisingly there has been much speculation on the Internet. Already Jose Maria Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister, has been forced to issue a formal denial this week after a Moroccan publication named him as the father. Rachida Dati may not be everyone's Cinderella but she is certainly independent and fearless.
