President Obasanjo has made himself popular among foreign governments and creditors for
President Obasanjo has made himself popular among foreign governments and creditors for his clampdown on corruption in Africa's most populous country. Mr Chirac dismissed her as "poor little Michele" after she tried to reconcile him and Mr Balladur and he kept her out of government after taking power.. NIGERIAN PRESIDENT Olusegun Obasanjo was yesterday accused of resorting to the tactics of military rule in order to quell violence that has claimed at least 1,200 lives in the six months since he took office. In 1995 she gained notoriety for trying to keep a foot in both the Chirac and Balladur camps when the two RPR heavyweights were slugging it out for the presidential nomination. He said: "I am sure that with her new team she will be able to put all her energy into the Gaullist movement in the service of the people of France."His congratulations were a marked departure from his earlier attitude to Ms Alliot-Marie. His high rating in the opinion polls is dependent on the boom of the last two years and widespread public approval of the political "truce" which has coincided with it.Mr Chirac acknowledged yesterday that Ms Alliot-Marie had made political history. But she has also promised to take a much more aggressive line with the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, with whom Mr Chirac has been forced to "co-habit" since 1997.
This will delight party activists but is less good news for the President. She also plans to streamline the bureaucracy of the party and make it more responsive to its members.So far so good for Mr Chirac. She never remarried but plunged into busy and, until now, mostly anonymous political activity. In the Juppe government from 1995 to 1997, she held the position of sports minister.She appealed to RPR members because she was a straight talker, but also because she was neither Mr Chirac's candidate nor associated with any of the party's many war-ring factions.After her victory, Ms Alliot-Marie immediately promised to unite the party: the pro and anti-Europeans, the pro-market modernisers and the pro-state traditionalists, the Catholic conservatives, and the blue-collar reactionaries. She married her law professor at 24 but divorced him 25 years later, after he refused to have children.
She is mayor of the town of St Jean-de-Luz in the Pyrenees, and is a former junior minister, with doctorates in law and politics. Mr Chirac had unofficially but clearly favoured the choice of Jean-Paul Delevoye, a weak and malleable provincial politician.Ms Alliot-Marie took 62.7 per cent of the vote in the second round of the election on Saturday. Her election as head of the RPR is, however, a stinging rebuff to the President from his supporters. She has been democratically chosen by the grass roots - against the wishes of the party's founder, President Jacques Chirac, and against the expectations of the Paris political and media establishment.As leader of the Gaullists, she stands in a line which comes down from Charles de Gaulle, through Georges Pompidou, Jacques Chirac, Edouard Balladur and Alain Juppe - presidents or prime ministers all.If President Chirac is re-elected in 2002, Ms Alliot-Marie could become Prime Minister. She is not a "woman politician", but a politician who happens to be a woman, in a party and a country where women have mostly been kept on the margins of political life.She has also broken themould of French politics in that she is not, like many French party leaders, a self-appointed, and self-important, political baron in search of an electorate.