Alain Marie Juppé (; born 15 August 1945) is a French politician. A member of The Republicans, he was Prime Minister of France from 1995 to 1997 under President Jacques Chirac, during which period he faced major strikes that paralysed the country and became very unpopular. He left office after the victory of the left in the snap 1997 legislative elections. He had previously served as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1993 to 1995, and as Minister of the Budget and Spokesman for the Government from 1986 to 1988. He was president of the political party Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) from 2002 to 2004 and mayor of Bordeaux from 2006 to 2019.
After the ghost jobs affair in December 2004, Juppé suspended his political career until he was re-elected as mayor of Bordeaux in October 2006. He served briefly as Minister of State for Ecology and Sustainable Development in 2007, but resigned in June 2007 after failing in his bid to be re-elected in the 2007 legislative election. He was Minister of Defence and Veterans Affairs from 2010 to 2011 and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2011 to 2012.
Juppé announced in 2015 his intention to contest his party's primary election ahead of the 2017 presidential election. He came in second place in the first open primary of the right and centre, and in the run-off, he lost to François Fillon. At the beginning of 2019, he accepted a nomination to become a member of the French Constitutional Council and subsequently announced that he would be resigning as mayor of Bordeaux.
Early life
Juppé was born Alain Marie Juppé on 15 August 1945, in Mont-de-Marsan, Aquitaine. His father was Robert Juppé (1915-1998), a Gaullist resistance fighter at the end of World War II, who came from a family of railwaymen and later became a farmer, and his mother was Marie Darroze (1910-2004), the devoted Catholic daughter of a judge.
His secondary studies took place at the Lycée Victor-Duruy (Landes). At 17, he graduated with a Baccalauréat. He then came to Paris for a literary preparatory classe at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and entered the (ENS) in 1964 to get a Classics agrégation in 1967. He completed his degrees at Sciences Po (1968) and at the National School of Administration (ENA) (1970-1972). From 1969 to 1970, he executed his compulsory military service.
Political career
Early political career (1976–1986) Alain Juppé's profession, outside politics, is Inspector of Finances, a position from which he was on leave to hold his various elected and appointed offices. He retired from the Inspection of Finances on 1 January 2003.
As a senior civil servant, he met Jacques Chirac at the end of the 1970s and became his adviser in the city council of Paris. In 1981, he was selected to be one of the first Young Leaders of the French-American Foundation.
A member of the RPR since its foundation in 1976, he lost his first attempts to be elected during the 1978 legislative elections and the 1979 cantonal elections. Then he moved to Paris to work with Chirac as one of the closest advisors to the mayor. In 1979, he was elected at the national board of the party. Two years later, he became the second manager of Chirac's campaign for the presidential election. Chirac ended third with 18% of the vote.
With Michel Aurillac, he led the club 89, officially a think tank, indeed a sort of counter-government to prepare the 1986 legislative elections. The victory of the RPR-UDF alliance in this ballot made Socialist President Mitterrand appointing Chirac as his Prime Minister.
Cabinet member (1986–1995)
He was minister of budget and spokesperson of Jacques Chirac's government from 1986 to 1988. He contributed to the free-market policy of Edouard Balladur, minister of Finances, during these years. During the 1988 presidential election, he combined these positions with those of spokesman of Chirac's campaign and head of his support committee.
Then, he was secretary general of the Rally for the Republic (Rassemblement pour la République or RPR) political party from 1988 to 1995. His role was to maintain Chirac's leadership on the party against the rise of the younger generation of "renovators" and of sovereignist Gaullists such as Philippe Séguin and Charles Pasqua. Pasqua humorously wrote in his Memoirs : "The RPR was now ruled like the North-Korean Communist Party... without the enlightened leadership of Kim Il Sung". He led the RPR-UDF alliance with former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing for the 1989 European elections but resigned from the European Parliament some months later because he was only needed to be a kind of electoral locomotive. In 1992, Chirac and Juppé supported the treaty of Maastricht against the majority of the RPR's members. The Gaullist fringe then considered him as a traitor.
In 1993, he was made Édouard Balladur's Foreign Minister. Along with President Mitterrand, he advocated a French expedition in Rwanda to save the most possible of threaten lives, while Prime minister Balladur and Defense minister François Léotard were fearing a slip toward a colonial intervention. Juppé defended the Turquoise Operation at the United Nations. Some controversies have emerged later on this subject (in August 2008, he was named in a Rwandan government report on the alleged French connection in the Rwanda genocide during his tenure as Foreign MinisterLe Rwanda menace de poursuivre Balladur, Juppé, Védrine et Villepin – L'EXPRESS . Lexpress.fr. Retrieved 9 April 2011.). From a general point of view, he has been considered to be one of the best Foreign ministers in France's recent history. Although he held the position of president of the RPR, he participated in the debate and endorsed Jacques Chirac instead of Balladur in the 1995 presidential election.
Prime Minister of France (1995–1997)
Because he supported Jacques Chirac against Edouard Balladur during the 1995 presidential campaign, he succeeded him as Prime Minister, also becoming president of the RPR. Jacques Chirac claimed Alain Juppé was "the best among us".
However, in November/December 1995, his plan for Welfare State reform caused the biggest social conflict since May 68 and, under duress, abandoned it. He became the most unpopular Prime Minister of the Fifth Republic (challenged only by Édith Cresson).
In January 1996, Alain Juppé, together with interior minister Jean-Louis Debré, opened negotiations with the FLNC-Canal Historique, then the largest guerrilla group in the Corsican conflict. The ensuing Tralonca peace campaign became Juppé's priority in government, holding numerous meetings and conferences and even traveling to Corsica. the peace would fail in 1996 after the French government refused to release political prisoners arrested during the peace process.
In spring 1997, President Chirac dissolved the National Assembly but lost the legislative election. Alain Juppé was succeeded by the Socialist Lionel Jospin. Furthermore, Juppé left the leadership of the RPR.
He campaigned for the unification of all the parties of the centre right behind Jacques Chirac, resulting in the Union for the Presidential Majority which became the Union for a Popular Movement (Union pour un mouvement populaire or UMP), and was its first president from 2002 to 2004.
As a member of the National Assembly (as representative of Paris from 1986 to 1997, then representative of Gironde), he was elected Mayor of Bordeaux in 1995, succeeding former Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas.
Criminal conviction (1999–2006) In 2004, Alain Juppé was tried for the felony of abuse of public funds, when he was head of the RPR and the RPR illegally used personnel provided by the City of Paris for running its operations. He was convicted and sentenced to an 18-month suspended jail sentence, the deprivation of civic rights for five years, and the deprivation of the right to run for political office for 10 years. He appealed the decision, whereupon his disqualification from holding elected office was reduced to one year and the suspended sentence cut to 14 months. He announced he would not appeal the ruling before the Court of Cassation. (See Corruption scandals in the Paris region.)
As a consequence, Alain Juppé resigned his mayoralty of Bordeaux and his position of head of the Bordeaux urban community.
The court commented: It is regrettable that at the time when the legislative body became aware of the need to end criminal practices which existed for the financing of political parties, Mr Juppé did not apply to his own party the very rules that he had voted for in Parliament. It is equally regrettable that Mr Juppé, whose intellectual qualities are unanimously recognized, did not judge appropriate to assume before Justice his entire criminal responsibility and kept on denying established facts. However, Mr Juppé has given himself for many years to the service of the State, while he did obtain no personal enrichment from these crimes he committed for the benefit of his political party, for which he should not be a scapegoat.Info et Actualité en direct – Toutes les actualités et infos – TF1 News. News.tf1.fr. Retrieved 9 April 2011.
Some commentators, such as Jean-Marc Ayrault, head of the National Assembly group of the Socialist Party, have argued that Juppé, in this judicial group, paid for a wider responsibility than his own.Info et Actualité en direct – Toutes les actualités et infos – TF1 News . News.tf1.fr. Retrieved 9 April 2011.
Some law professors argued that the Versailles court could not legally exempt Juppé from a disposition of the Electoral Code article L7, Détail d'un code . Legifrance.gouv.fr. Retrieved 9 April 2011. Détail d'un article de code . Legifrance.gouv.fr. Retrieved 9 April 2011. which bars any person sentenced for illegal taking of interests from being on an electoral roll for a period of 5 years, also preventing that person from running for office. Another disposition of the Electoral Code specifies that any person deprived of the right to be on an electoral roll for a certain period following a judicial sentence is deprived of the right of running for the French National Assembly for double that period, which would bar Juppé for 10 years. When Alain Juppé registered again as a voter, other voters sued to have his registration cancelled; however, the Bordeaux court of small claims ruled against them. Some of the plaintiffs declared they would appeal the decision before the Court of Cassation. Another possible issue is that should Alain Juppé be elected to national office, the Constitutional Council could cancel the election on grounds that Juppé was illegally registered as a voter. President Jacques Chirac could have used his right of pardon in favor of Juppé, but this would have probably been politically disastrous.Le Canard Enchaîné, 22 December 2004
Juppé considered giving classes on public administration at a variety of prominent United States and Quebec universities and colleges, including the UQÀM in Montreal, some of which were initially receptive to having a former prime minister be a member of their faculty. However, following Juppé's conviction, his appointment was contested by some teachers.Le Canard Enchaîné, 16 February 2005 Juppé was finally taken in by the École nationale d'administration publique in Montreal where he served as a full-time faculty member for the academic year 2005–2006.
Return to public life (2006–2010) Juppé was reelected as Mayor of Bordeaux in October 2006.
In May 2007, he was appointed Minister of State, Minister of Ecology and Sustainable Development in the Government of François Fillon, being in fact the number two of the Government in protocolar order. This is the third time in the history of Fifth Republic (after Michel Debré and Laurent Fabius) that a former Prime Minister returned as a Minister in another government (although some Presidents of the Council of the Fourth Republic were Ministers of the Fifth Republic).