L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree

being the maunderings of an Englishman on the Côte d'Azur

19 June 2007 Blog Home : June 2007 : Permalink

Ni putes ni soumises mais ministre

AP reports (in French google xlation, also here in English) that Fadela Amara, the founder the "Ni putes ni soumises" movement  for immigrant women in France has been invited to join the Sarko government as a junior minister for cities. Ms Amara is generally considered to be somewhat leftish, although she is not IIRC officially a member of the socialist party. Of course the socialists have declared that members of their party who accpet Sarko's invitiations will be chucked out of the party, as has happened to Dr Koucher and may also happen to another new junior minister. In fact as Bloomberg reports the new enlarged Sarko government of 30 ministers or one sort or another is distinctly not a pure UMP affair:

Ten, including Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, don't belong to the UMP party. Jean-Marie Bockel, a Socialist senator and mayor of the eastern city of Mulhouse, was named today a junior minister. Andre Santini, member of the New Center party, will be in charge of public servants, Valerie Letard, a centrist, will oversee ``solidarity and social affairs.''

In fact the Sarko government is distinctly different in cast to the usual one with a lot of female and dusky faces as well as all those different political outlooks, quite a change from the usual array of stodgy middleaged white males with an occasional token white female or (even more rarely) non-white male. As well as the above it also has another young immigrant female, Rama Yade, a young UMP rising star not dissimilar in background etc. to Justice Minister Rachida Dati and the reshuffle also means that Christine Lagarde, a lady who was the first female directer of US law firm Baker and Mckenzie, is now the finance minister.