For Alain Juppé, a Career Recharged, Along With France’s Global Role

ALAIN JUPPÉ, resurrected in politics after a criminal conviction in 2004 for political chicanery, is the quiet, strong center of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s effort to secure re-election in France next year.

Mr. Juppé, 66, France’s foreign minister, is serious, competent, polite, intelligent and slightly dull — just the kind of “homme sérieux” that voters suspect Mr. Sarkozy, with all his impatient flash, is not.

Having been foreign minister from 1993 to 1995, and then prime minister, Mr. Juppé was brought back to the Quai d’Orsay in February this year to restore calm, order and credibility to a ministry shaken by the sudden and humiliating fall of Michèle Alliot-Marie. She not only failed to see the revolution in Tunisia coming, but she also vacationed there with her parents during antigovernment demonstrations as the guests of an intimate of the old leadership.

Like the equally serious prime minister, François Fillon, Mr. Juppé is considered to be a safe pair of hands, and a constraint on the impetuous Mr. Sarkozy, both to rein him in and find ways to make his better ideas function as policy.

The new relationship did not begin well. Mr. Sarkozy, eager to get on the right side of the Arab Spring, set off on a path toward early recognition of the Libyan rebels and military support for them without consulting his new foreign minister.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, brought key Libyans to see Mr. Sarkozy in early March. Mr. Sarkozy reportedly joked that to conduct airstrikes, it would be necessary “to step over the body of Juppé.” Mr. Juppé denies having been taken by surprise, but he reportedly threatened to quit unless Mr. Sarkozy stopped behaving unilaterally.

Juppé is very much like his mentor, former President Jacques Chirac. Arrogant, elitist, and brilliant, he follows in the old Frencg mold: Arabist, anti-Israel, in bed with oil- And a back stabbing snake in the grass, to boot!
Of all the Sarko would be challengers, Juppé is the only one to have the leadership ability, intelligence, and training to lead France. Unfortunately for him, he is a convicted crook.
This from the NYT magazine:
Mr. Juppé was convicted in 2004 of a felony misuse of public funds and sentenced to an 18-month suspended jail sentence and barred from holding elected office for 10 years. He appealed, and the sentence was reduced and the ban limited to one year. He quit as mayor of Bordeaux and spent the 2005-6 academic year in Montreal teaching, before being re-elected mayor in late 2006.

He served briefly as junior minister for ecology in 2007, then lost a race for a seat in Parliament. But he was brought into the cabinet in triumph as defense minister in November 2010 and has since had an impressive resurrection.

While he repeats that Mr. Sarkozy is the best candidate for next year, Mr. Juppé has also mused on the possibility of running for the presidency in 2017. On the plane, over a glass of Château Carbonnieux, a fine Bordeaux, he noted that Senator John McCain ran for the presidency at 72, the age a fit Mr. Juppé will reach in 2017. Unspoken was the possibility, however remote, that Mr. Sarkozy, low in the polls, might not even choose to run for re-election.

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