New French govt gets to work
Immigration, as well as unemployment, are at the top of the agenda of France’s new government, which has the task of pulling the nation out of a crisis of confidence.
The new team, in its first day on the job, was to hold its first Cabinet meeting today, government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope said.
Meanwhile, the opposition criticised the new team as being too similar to the exiting government.
Socialist Party spokesman Julien Dray predicted that it “won’t last two years”. President Jacques Chirac’s mandate ends in 22 months.
“This government can’t provide the needed impetus,” said centrist MP Maurice Leroy in an interview in the daily Le Parisien.
New Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has promised to tackle double-digit unemployment and return confidence to the French by giving “new impetus” to the government.
There will be a “very strong mobilisation” to fight the 10% unemployment rate, said Cope, the government spokesman.
However, the government will also tackle the immigration issue, “an area that the French have not stopped calling us on”, he said.
Immigration will fall under the domain of Nicolas Sarkozy, the new interior minister and No. 2. He was off to a fast start today, headed to Perpignan where two communities, Gypsies and North Africans, have been in a stand-off for days.
Sarkozy, who served as a law-and-order interior minister in an earlier government, said in a television interview last night that repeat offenders and crime victims also were priorities.
De Villepin’s streamlined government of 31 ministers includes 23 who had figured in the outgoing team, which had 40 members.
Chirac decided to replace Jean-Pierre Raffarin as prime minister after the stinging defeat last Sunday of a referendum on a European Union constitution.
The victory of the “No” camp was seen as a sanction against the government.
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