Word: villepin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Teutonic stand-in for Nicolas Sarkozy, France's super-ambitious interior minister who heads the ruling conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), yet regularly issues pithy calls for a total "rupture" of the status quo politics of President Jacques Chirac and his current prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, and a more radical free-market agenda. Merkel's slow descent into parity with the Social Democrats, says political scientist Dominique ReynieŽ, is "bad news for Sarkozy. It turns out he's making the same mistake as Merkel: talking about a 'rupture' in a country that is afraid...
...right voters of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front. If so, he'll have to contend with his own government first. Justice Minister Pascal Clément noted that "the law, all of the law, was respected" in the prisoner's early release, and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin lectured that "nothing should put in question the independence of the judiciary." For his part, the judge in question accused Sarkozy of "demagoguery," and the Superior Council of Magistrates filed a formal complaint with Chirac. UMP parliamentary deputy Jean-Michel Fourgous said the intense reaction shows that for Sarkozy...
Punch and Judy have nothing on Jean-Pierre and Dominique, France's pugilistic conservative politicians. Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and his Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin have long discounted press reports that de Villepin is after his boss's job. But last week the gloves came off when de Villepin took to the radio and declared that France needed new policies and direction - and indicated he'd be available to provide that leadership, confessing he was one of those "who all their lives prepare to fulfill missions." Change, he said, should "take ... into account the feelings, hopes, and frustrations...
...eager body language almost too precisely. Alex Jennings' George W. Bush cannily suggests the confidence and drive beneath the cowboy persona. And the dramatic high point comes when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell (Joe Morton) battles with Nick Sampson's silkily threatening French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin over the all-important right to a second United Nations resolution. If all that sounds more like a news story than a play, Hare the playwright has defeated Hare the propagandist. The veteran dramatist knows that great characters make great drama, and he delivers them...
...polls, but Chirac opted to renominate him and install Nicolas Sarkozy, the most ambitious figure on the French right, as Economics, Finance and Industry Minister. Except for Borloo, a politically unclassifiable figure with no standing in the ruling party, Chirac was largely content to reshuffle loyal followers. Dominique de Villepin moves to the Interior Ministry from foreign affairs, where he has been replaced by European Commissioner Michel Barnier. The very sameness in the Cabinet puts the incandescent Borloo center stage, but it could also hamper him. Sarkozy, burdened with a huge budget deficit, is unlikely to allow him the renewal...