France Appoints Right-Wing Culture Minister

Rachida Dati, who once served as justice minister under right-wing French president Nicolas Sarkozy, has beenannouncedas France’s new culture minister. Dati makes her surprise reappearance as beleaguered centrist president Emmanuel Macron seeks to neutralize the threat posed by the far right ahead of June elections with the appointment of Gabriel Attal as prime minister. Attal, who is thirty-four, is the country’s youngest-ever prime minister and the first openly gay person to hold the office; though he is affiliated with the center left, his political career has been marked by actions that appeal to conservatives.

Dati’spoliticsare decidedly more straightforward. Raised in poverty in Burgundy, she was named as justice minister in 2007, thus becoming the first Muslim woman to hold a top-tier position in French government. Following her 2009 departure from Sarkozy’s cabinet, Dati that same year became a member of European parliament; she served in the legislative body through 2019.

At the time of her appointment as culture minister, she was mayor of Paris’s tony Seventh Arrondissement, affiliated with the liberal conservative party Les Républicains, from whose ranks she was expelled following her acceptance of the role.RelatedPENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS TO SHUTTER COLLEGE IN 2025INDIANA UNIVERSITY CANCELS MAJOR EXHIBITION OF PALESTINIAN ARTIST SAMIA HALABY Dati replaces outgoing culture minister Rima Abdul Malak, who had clashed with Macron on France’s new hardline immigration policy and on thefateof renowned French actor Gérard Depardieu, currently the subject of a rape investigation and of a recent documentary in which he made lewd comments regarding women and girls: Malak believed he should be stripped of the Legion of Honor, while Macron felt that Depardieu was being unfairly targeted in a “manhunt.” The new culture minister herself is the subject of an investigation by France’s financial crimes unit. Launched in 2021, the effort is aimed at discovering whether the €900,000 ($986,000) she received from former Renault chief Carlos Ghosn for consulting work she did for him between 2010 and 2012 while she was a European parliament member constitutes “passive corruption by a person holding an elective mandate.” French dailyLe Mondeportrayed the appointment of Dati as culture minister as a “coup” for Macron. Anne Hidalgo, a member of the Socialist Party, who beat Dati in the 2020 election for Paris mayor, offered a different, if equallysuccinctopinion: “Good luck to people in the cultural world, given the ordeals they are going to face.”.