Word: french
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...once the star of the French government and an icon of racial diversity near the summit of power. But now Rama Yade - the Senegal-born minister whom President Nicolas Sarkozy once called "my Condi Rice" - has angered her boss, alienated colleagues and fallen into such disgrace that her ejection from the cabinet is virtually certain during a shake-up next spring. About the only thing not failing Yade these days is public opinion - which continues to rank the outspoken 32-year-old higher than any of the politicians now yearning for her ouster...
...reasons that Sarkozy named Yade to government in the first place. Alongside Justice Minister Rachida Dati, the daughter of immigrants from Algeria and Morocco, Yade serves as living proof of Sarkozy's promise that there is room for capable, energetic people of all races in French politics - and at every level of French life. Dati and Yade quickly became fixtures in France's media, favorites in public-opinion polls and darlings of the image-conscious Sarkozy. After Sarkozy named the women to his first cabinet in May 2007, however, the ambitious Dati wound up creating problems and public embarrassments...
...Yade has also run afoul of Sarkozy - usually by speaking her mind in a manner that infuriates government colleagues as much as it thrills the French public. When Sarkozy prepared to greet Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2007, for example, a visibly disgusted Yade - then serving as the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Human Rights - warned that "Gaddafi must realize our country isn't a doormat upon which a leader, whether terrorist or not, can come to wipe off the blood of his crimes." And while Dati knuckled under to Sarkozy's order to run for the European...
...French President Nicolas Sarkozy has spent the past year hammering away at the excesses of American-style capitalism. In September, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso declared that workers' rights and "social cohesion" were top priorities on the Old Continent. And Italy's veteran Economy Minister, Giulio Tremonti, went out of his way last month to praise the posto fisso (guaranteed job for life) as a supreme public value. (See which businesses are bucking the recession...
...Sarkozy, whose nose for the political winds is legendary, was once known as Sarko the American when more and more French were looking across the Atlantic to the flexible approach to work and dynamic business environment. But the French President reacted quickly last autumn to the Wall Street implosion by taking the lead in offering an alternative model to the U.S.'s. "The idea of the absolute power of the markets that should not be constrained by any rule, by any political intervention, was a mad idea," he declared in a widely cited speech last September in Toulon...