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| Rachida Dati: In 2002, she wrote to Sarkozy, saying, 'You need me.' Joel Saget/AP/pool |
In clubby France, a Muslim woman as justice minister
Rachida Dati presents Nicholas Sarkozy's tough law-and-order proposals to the Senate this week.
By Susan Sachs | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the July 3, 2007 edition
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Paris - As the new French government this week begins driving conservative crime-fighting reforms through parliament, its chief wrangler will be a doe-eyed Muslim who grew up in public housing.
Her background may be unconventional and her political experience thin. But Justice Minister Rachida Dati has already proved adept at breaking through barriers.
Ms. Dati is the first minister of North African heritage and one of seven cabinet-level women in France's most diverse government ever. One of 12 children raised by a Moroccan father and an Algerian mother, she is a distinct oddity in the clubby, Christian, and male-dominated political elite.
Her trajectory from a crowded apartment block to the gilded corridors of French power is also an exception in a country where social advancement is rare for people of immigrant descent. She's been held up as a minority success story, a testament to the value of hard work and a trophy for her mentor, President Nicolas Sarkozy and his idealized vision of France as a meritocracy.
Arabs from the former French colonies in North Africa have been settling in France in large numbers for 50 years and are thought to make up nearly 10 percent of the population. Some have made it as athletes or musicians. But they have yet to reach comparable weight in the top ranks of business, academia, and politics.
Letter to Sarkozy: 'You need me'
The insecurities that hold back many French Arabs seemed foreign to Dati, or kept well-hidden, according to friends.
"She is representative of the new generation, the people with ambition and university degrees who demand to be treated on an equal footing," says Hakim el-Karoui, a banker and cofounder, with Dati, of a club for up-and-coming activists of immigrant heritage.
Unlike many of her associates in the 21st-Century Club, Dati found her home on France's political right wing. She owes her swift ascension to astute and determined networking, begun when she was a schoolgirl writing admiring letters to the famous people she read about in magazines.
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