The rise and fall of Rachida Dati

Born to a poor immigrant Muslim family, France's justice minister has had an astonishing political ascent, appearing in glamorous magazine shoots and holidaying with the Sarkozys. But now pregnant with a child whose father she refuses to name, and facing a rebellion by the country's judges over her 'incoherent policies', her future looks uncertain.

Rachida Dati, petite in her trademark black suit and high heels, bursts into the gilded dining room of her justice ministry, late for breakfast. She beams her famous "Plexiglass smile" - polite but guarded - and flashes a look that says, "I'm not finished yet." Dati is a French icon, Nicolas Sarkozy's hand-picked symbol of change: the first Muslim woman to hold a major government post. She adores appearing on magazine covers but is defensive in briefings, bristling at critics and, when cornered, she repeats her unfailing devotion to her mentor Sarkozy and his right-wing policies. She doesn't like being constantly reminded of her improbable rise from poverty against all the odds of French discrimination, and hates being called the Cinderella of the housing estates. But she keeps her family close. At one of Sarkozy's early Elysée parties, as Dati mingled wearing haute couture, I met her father, Mbark, a retired Moroccan builder, sitting at the edge of the grand Salle des Fêtes observing the great and the good sip champagne. Dati's brother, Jamal, had recently been jailed for dealing drugs and Dati Sr, a severe disciplinarian, was torn between the huge disappointment at his criminal son and joy over his daughter, the justice minister. "I think of Rachida, not Jamal," he said.

Dati has been hailed as the nearest thing France's fractured society has to Barack Obama. The French justice minister was raised in poverty on a housing estate in deepest Burgundy. Sarkozy said appointing her sent a message "to all the children of France that with merit and effort everything becomes possible". He also hoped it would neutralise the bad feeling after the riots on the run-down housing estates and his comment likening the wayward youths to scum.

Despite scepticism that this "window-dressing" at the top did little to change the discrimination poisoning French society, Dati immediately became one of the most popular figures in France. The speed of her rise has been staggering. But that of her fall could be too. The Dati fairytale has started to go spectacularly wrong.

This autumn, aged 42 and single, Dati announced that she was pregnant and would not name the father or elaborate on her "complicated" private life, which in recent years has seen her linked to two millionaire businessmen. The former Spanish prime minister, José María Aznar, and the French junior sports minister and former rugby coach, Bernard Laporte, denied the child was theirs. It was seized on by international celebrity magazines and has become the stuff of satire and low jokes in Paris political circles.

Dati's baby is due in January and her pregnancy has coincided with another major crisis at her justice ministry. Magistrates have taken to the streets in protest at what they see as botched reforms and government interference in the independence of the judiciary. Yesterday, in an unprecedented move, over 500 magistrates and judges signed a letter to Dati attacking her "incoherent policies". France's dire prisons are so overcrowded and fetid that murder and suicide are rife. Prison wardens have threatened action and a succession of Dati's advisers have quit. There has been speculation that Dati could use the birth of her child as an excuse to leave politics, or that she could be moved by Sarkozy, who some sense, has left his protégée to hang out to dry. But sacking a minister on maternity leave is out of the question. And Dati is so much part of the president's image and so deeply entwined in his own complicated private life, that to demote her would also damage him. Privately she says she wants to stay and fight on in the justice ministry, dismissive of the Elysée intrigues and what she feels are attacks by the white, conservative elite. Maternity leave, she says, is for wimps. She will be back at her desk within three weeks of the birth.

Dati grew up on the outskirts of the provincial town of Chalons-sur-Saône. She was the second of 12 children born to Mbark and Fatim-Zohra, an an illiterate Algerian. Her parents struggled to make ends meet, sewing their children's clothes out of curtain fabric that Rachida complained made them look like they were in a cult. The first building site Mbark worked on in France was a Catholic convent school. He went to the headteacher and asked if his two oldest daughters, Malika and Rachida, could be admitted. The mother superior was astonished but agreed, cautioning that he would have to pay the modest fees. It was here that Dati forged her fierce will to succeed. Anything less than top of the class was seen as a failure. She would help adults in her council block write letters and fill out forms, order children to stop playing and do homework: she would give presentations about Islam to her Catholic class. From 16, she stacked up a dizzying number of part-time jobs to help support the family: selling Avon beauty products door to door, selling sausages, working at a service station and on a supermarket checkout. When she left for university in Dijon to study economics she worked nights as a hospital assistant, sending money home.

Dati's friends call her a consummate networker. As a student, she scoured newspapers, picking out business leaders and politicians and bombarding them with letters asking for advice, internships and jobs.
It worked:
she soon had a job as an auditor in Paris and a posse of supportive business leaders and even cabinet ministers mentoring her. At 27, she briefly returned to Burgundy to marry an Algerian engineer chosen by her family. In the ceremony at the town hall, when asked for her "I do", her mumbled answer was unintelligible and three years later she persuaded the courts to annul the marriage on the basis of lack of consent. Her escape from that mysterious arrangement - on which she refuses to elaborate - would later further endear her to the French republican elite wedded to the stereotype of Muslim women held in bondage by their men and their faith.

On the advice of her new mentor, Simone Veil, the revered holocaust survivor and former minister, she trained as a magistrate and practised for a short period until she focused on her most important networking target: Sarkozy. In 2002 he became minister of the interior and she deluged him with letters. He was astonished at her tenacity and ordered his team to find her a minor advisory post.

"At the start, I said, 'What are you doing with Sarkozy?' He was on the right, it wasn't the obvious choice of someone from our background," says Morad Aït-Habbouche, Dati's best friend. "She said, 'He's surprised me, he's very active on changing things, on diversity.' Her career is really tied up with Sarkozy. She says her destiny is linked to his. They are similar in some ways - he has some immigrant roots, although it's always easier to be from Europe than the Magreb."

Aït-Habbouche became friends with Dati during one of her early networking drives. He was one of the very few French TV reporters with an Algerian name and she wrote to him saying she liked what he stood for. They both grew up with discrimination, no public role models, and the dead weight of the war in Algeria still hanging over French society. Together, they founded the 21st Century Club, a networking group for young people from diverse backgrounds. "Rachida never wanted to go into politics," he says. "I always thought she had all the qualities to be one of the first MPs with immigrant roots, but she said no. Then she met Sarkozy and decided he was the right person to follow."

Dati's attempts to emulate Sarkozy even extends to the president's trademark jogging.

"She got into running when she went on holiday with his family. She started doing 30-minute stints, now she can do two and a half hours. She's got amazing strength," says Aït-Habbouche. He used to run with her in Paris, where, like a Parisian Rocky, she'd race up the steps of the Trocadero.

Dati was drawn to Sarkozy by his "rage". "There's something in me that echoes with him, a mirror effect. Like me, he can't bear to be humiliated," she has said. Both feel themselves to be outsiders, her because of her background, him because of the foreign-sounding Hungarian surname he says haunted him and the fact that he didn't study in Paris's elite graduate schools. He also feels deeply self-conscious about his absent father following his parents' divorce when he was a child, which set him apart from his bourgeois peers in western Paris.

It was Sarkozy's first wife, Cécilia who suggested he pluck Dati from the obscurity of her post as a little-known ministry adviser and appoint her spokeswoman for his presidential campaign at the end of 2006. Without experience of working within Sarkozy's UMP party or ever having run for elected office, Dati was thrust forward as his main spokeswoman on TV. Her appointment wrong-footed the French left's white elite. Dati was a huge media success, arguing Sarkozy's rightwing views from carefully prepared scripts. She was also given the job of improving Sarkozy's image on the housing estates, despite growing up in provincial France with a private convent education that bore little resemblance to the crowded high-rise ghettos outside Paris. Tarik Mouadane, then 25, the son of a Moroccan cleaner from troubled Argenteuil, attended meetings with her at the ministry in Paris. "She always said to me, never forget where you came from," he says. "It was difficult for her. She cried over people in the party who felt she shouldn't have been where she was."

From the start, however, Dati was at the heart of the Sarkozy's soap opera of a marriage to Cécilia - something that would later undermine her. She built a close friendship with Cécilia, who called her "my sister". Dati stayed faithful to Cécilia during the couple's first public split before the election campaign, and then enjoyed Cécilia's public backing on her return. When Sarkozy won the presidency and made Dati justice minister, she initially continued to be associated in the public eye with the Sarkozys' expensive tastes and social life. She went on holiday with the couple to Wolfeboro in the US. She appeared on the cover of a celebrity magazine on the arm of the Dior designer John Galliano. She posed in Dior dresses on the cover of Paris Match. "She even went to film-wrap parties," said one insider on the Paris scene.

When the Sarkozys' marriage began to break up, Dati went on every official presidential trip as a kind of surrogate first lady. She was lampooned in France for her ostentatious outfits, such as a floor-length Dior gown and fur at the White House, where she was the only minister allowed to follow Sarkozy into the main entrance. Why do you go on all these trips, I asked her at her ministry one morning when criticism of her jet setting was mounting. "I like seeing the world at the highest level," she shot back.

When Cécilia finally filed for divorce, Dati was left vulnerable. The sniping began almost immediately. One of the first books about Sarkozy's whirlwind courtship of his third wife, Carla Bruni, described how Bruni once passed the bedroom of the Elysée palace with Dati and said: "You would have liked to occupy it, wouldn't you?" Bruni would later reportedly ask Dati not to call her husband early every morning.

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With Dati now distanced from Sarkozy's inner circle, she has nowhere to hide. With little money at her disposal, and a raft of tough law and order bills to push through, the justice ministry was always going to be a fraught post. France was already reeling from a miscarriage of justice scandal, and UN Human Rights Committee and Council of Europe reports accusing prisons of being dirty, degrading and inhumane. Some have twice as many inmates as they were designed for, with many prisoners forced to sleep on mattresses on the floor. There have been more than 90 suicides in prisons this year.

Yet Dati sees herself as Sarkozy's "little soldier", faithfully carrying out his zero-tolerance policies. She has implemented Sarkozy's plan to shut a series of provincial courts and cut costs. She has pushed through his drive to clamp down on reoffenders, recommending stiffer sentences to judges. But relations between her and magistrates are now so bad that Sarkozy was forced to take over and meet the magistrates' union himself. "Rachida Dati meets us, but she doesn't listen to us," said Christophe Régnard, a magistratewho leads the biggest union. "When you put things to her, she says simply, 'No, that's not true.' When you say the Council of Europe has said it, she still says, 'No, that's not true.' It's not possible to work like that."

Sarkozy does not feel let down by Dati as a minister - she has implemented his reforms, and more quickly than most of her colleagues. "He's more let down by the fact she hasn't succeeded in imposing herself politically," says Bruno Jeudy, co-author of Sarkozy and His Women, which explores the Sarkozy-Dati relationship. "It's as if she climbed to power too fast with no political grounding."

In France, it is common for presidents to pluck ministers from non-political life, such as the former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who had never held elected office. But it makes these ministers vulnerable. This year, Sarkozy encouraged Dati to run as mayor for his centre-right party in the safe, chic seventh arrondissement on Paris's left bank. He felt it would give her elected legitimacy. Despite the safe seat, she did not win the expected vast majority and was only elected on the second round.

Dati, like her mentor Sarkozy, attacks when she feels wronged. She says that opposition to her at the justice ministry comes from a reactionary, conservative white ruling class who resent her presence. Her place in the French cabinet is undoubtedly a historic moment in the political life of a country still riven by racial discrimination. Mainland France currently has only one non-white MP and, in a recent poll, 80% of French people said they might vote for a black person at president, but only 58% could bring themselves to vote for one of millions of the French citizens of Algerian, Moroccan or Tunisian descent. As a role model, Dati is perhaps not the easiest person to warm to. But her appointment under the patronage of Sarkozy, and more importantly her survival, which now rests entirely on his whim, shows the real depths of the problem for minorities in France, who feel they are not being allowed to rise of their own accord. Fadela Amara, another woman of Algerian parentage whom Sarkozy appointed as a junior minister, says an Obama would have got nowhere in France. "It couldn't happen in France unless Sarkozy turned emperor and appointed a black president himself," she says.

• Angelique Chrisafis
  
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday November 20 2008
  
• The Guardian, Thursday November 20 2008

Rachida Dati, the French justice minister has given birth.

The 43-year-old gave birth by caesarean early on Friday afternoon to a girl - named Zohra, after the minister's mother, Fatima-Zohra, at a hospital in the west of the French capital.

So what? You might well ask. Well, "so a lot" perhaps, because the circumstances surrounding the birth and the role of Dati in politics says a fair bit about France.

Dati, you might remember, made history here by becoming not only the first woman to hold the office of justice minister, but also by being the first person of North African descent to make it into the government.

She has created plenty of controversy during her time at the ministry "haemorrhaging" staff at an alarming rate and facing accusations of incompetence from the opposition Socialist party and certain sectors of the French media.

But one thing surrounding which there was no real controversy was her announcement at the end of last summer that she was expecting a baby.

Dati, who is unmarried, consistently refused to reveal the name of the father, saying the "situation was complicated", and much of the French media has been willing to leave it at that.

Of course the "mystery" surrounding the identity of the father has also led to some speculation - particularly among the weekly glossy magazines - with the name of a former Spanish prime minister and that of a popular French television and radio presenter being among "potential paters".

On the whole though, throughout her pregnancy, Dati's right to privacy has pretty much been respected.

It's not that often that a serving French minister has given birth in office. There was also another notable politician - wait for it - none other than Ségolène Royal, the defeated Socialist party candidate in the 2007 presidential election and the narrow loser of the battle to lead the party in November last year.

Back in 1992, while a minister in the government of prime minister, Pierre Bérégovoy, Royal gave birth to a daughter. Although in a long-term relationship at the time with François Hollande, Royal wasn't married either.

Back to Dati though, and her future role in government is far from being certain. She has dropped out of Sarkozy's "inner circle" of which she was so long a member, has come under constant attack from the media, and is rumoured to be the governing UMP party's preferred choice to head its push for the European parliamentary elections in June this year (in place of the junior minister for human rights, Rama Yade, who has refused to run.

Should Dati, who is also currently the mayor of the VII arrondissement in Paris, accept that challenge, she would most likely be asked to step down form the government.

But that as they say, is for the moment, just speculation.

Right now though, Dati is a reportedly "proud" first-time mother, who just a few weeks before giving birth was quoted as saying "there's more to life than just politics

French justice chief Dati 'plans' to quit

France's first north African Muslim woman minister is to step down and run for European parliament.

Rachida Dati, the French justice minister handpicked by Nicolas Sarkozy as his symbol of change, is expected to quit in June after standing for the European parliament.

The minister, who recently returned to work five days after giving birth in order to fight to keep her post, is said to have resisted leaving the government.

Le Figaro reported today that Dati was now "resigned" to leaving but had sought reassurances that, alongside her new European role, she would continue to have a future in national politics.

Dati, the first Muslim woman with north African parents to hold a major French ministerial post, has seen her justice ministry lurch from crisis to crisis. Advisers quit, judges questioned her style and France's foetid and overcrowded prisons are in crisis with record suicide rates.

Her unpopularity among judges and lawyers was felt to be overshadowing Sarkozy's plans to reform the judicial system. The European election is seen as a way for her to leave her key post with dignity and maintain her media presence as the face of Sarkozyism.

A source from Sarkozy's centre-right UMP party told AFP news agency that she would run for the European elections but no decision had been fixed on her departure from government.

Dati was always vulnerable. She was personally appointed by Sarkozy to one of France's most important ministries having never run for election and with little experience of party politics. This meant her future depended on the president's whim and strategy.

On Sarkozy's advice, Dati ran as centre-right mayor of Paris's 7th arrondissement last year to gain electoral experience, but despite the safe seat in a rich bourgeois constituency, she was only elected on the second round. Meanwhile, the president and his own team took control of the key justice dossiers, weakening her.

Sarkozy, who believes Barack Obama's election in the US has thrown the spotlight on France's lack of non-white politicians, wanted a leading diversity figure to stand for the European elections. The young, Senegal-born junior minister for human rights, Rama Yade, declined, causing a rift. Dati has agreed to be second on the party election list for the greater Paris region, allowing her to keep her ministry right up until the vote.

Dati's lack of maternity leave prompted controversy in France earlier this month. The Socialist politician, and former presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal accused Sarkozy of bullying by giving Dati no option but to return to work for the announcement of a key justice reform, which he had scheduled himself.

The birth put Dati back on the front pages and is likely to boost the public popularity of the 43-year-old single mother, who will not name the father of her child.

Dati is reported to have adapted rooms at the justice ministry for the baby, and her sisters are helping with childcare. Bernadette Chirac, wife of Jacques Chirac, told the press that Dati was breastfeeding.

Friday 23 January 2009 11.17 GMT