French FM Alliot-Marie Resigns, Sarkozy Reshuffles Cabinet
French President Nicolas Sarkozy named former premier Alain Juppe as his new foreign minister Sunday, after Michele Alliot-Marie, tainted by her ties to the former Tunisian regime, resigned.
Juppe will be replaced as defense minister by Gerard Longuet, the leader of Sarkozy's center right party in the French Senate, the president announced in a brief televised address to the nation.
Sarkozy's chief of staff, Claude Gueant, will become interior minister, charged with restoring the government's reputation as tough on crime with a view to his leader's expected 2012 reelection bid.
Beleaguered Alliot-Marie announced her resignation Sunday after weeks of criticism over her contacts with the former Tunisian regime, stressing she had committed no wrongdoing.
"While I do not feel that I have committed any wrongdoing, I have ... decided to leave my job as foreign minister," Alliot-Marie wrote in her resignation letter to President Nicolas Sarkozy, a copy of which was seen by Agence France Presse.
"I ask you to accept my resignation," she wrote in the letter which begins with a handwritten "Dear Nicolas."
"Since several weeks, I have been the target of political attacks and then in the media, using, to create suspicion, counter-truths and generalizations," wrote Alliot-Marie, who was named France's first woman foreign minister in December.
"For the last two weeks, it is my family's private life that has been suffering real harassment at the hands of certain media (and) I cannot accept that some people use this cabal to try to make people believe in a weakening of France's international policy."
"I have too much consideration for politics in the service of France to accept being used as a pretext for such an operation (and) I have too much loyalty to and friendship for you to accept that your international action could in any way suffer from it."
MAM, as she is universally known, became embroiled in recent weeks in a series of scandals over her controversial links to Tunisia, where she took a holiday during its popular uprising.
Subsequent revelations about her and her family's links to the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and her offer for France to help riot police quell the uprising there, made her position increasingly untenable.
It emerged that she had holidayed in the former French colony during the uprising, using the private jet of a businessman allegedly linked to Ben Ali's regime, from whom her parents also bought a stake in a company.
Faced with rising criticism, she fatefully said: "When I am on holiday, I am not foreign minister."
Source: Agence France Presse
| Copyright © 2012 Naharnet.com. All Rights Reserved. | https://cdn.naharnet.com/stories/en/3496 |