Rachida Dati, a former minister for the rightwing French president Nicolas Sarkozy, has been appointed as culture minister in a surprise return to government under Emmanuel Macron.
Dati, who is serving as the mayor of Paris’s 7th arrondissement for the rightwing party Les Républicains, was announced as part of a cabinet reshuffle under the new prime minister, Gabriel Attal.
Dati became the first Muslim woman to hold a major government post in 2007 when she was appointed justice minister during the Sarkozy presidency.
She grew up on a low-income estate on the outskirts of the town of Chalons-sur-Saône, in Burgundy.
In 2007, Sarkozy said appointing Dati sent a message “to all the children of France that with merit and effort everything becomes possible”.
In recent years, Dati had become a key figure on the right in Paris and a vocal critic of the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo.
Éric Ciotti, the head of Les Républicains, immediately announced that Dati would be excluded from the party.
In 2021, Dati was placed under formal investigation by France’s financial crimes unit over her dealings with the former Renault chief Carlos Ghosn. She was accused of alleged “passive corruption by a person holding an elective mandate” and of “benefiting from abuse of power” in relation to consulting work she did for Ghosn from 2010-12, when she was also a member of the European parliament.
The investigation is attempting to establish whether €900,000 she received in lawyer’s fees in that period was for legal work or whether she was engaged in lobbying, which is illegal for European lawmakers. Dati has denied any wrongdoing.
The Socialist party leader, Olivier Faure, highlighted the legal investigation into Dati as a problem for someone being recruited to government, saying it sent “a bad signal” and went against Macron’s promises of an “exemplary” republic.
Dati takes over as culture minister from Rima Abdul Malak, who had been part of a small group of ministers who expressed concern about Macron’s recent hardline immigration law. Abdul Malak had also recently said that the French actor Gérard Depardieu shocked France with his sexist comments about women and girls shown in a documentary. Macron contradicted Abdul Malak by saying that Depardieu – who is under formal investigation for rape and facing scrutiny over sexist comments – was the target of a ‘manhunt’ and that he admired him as a star.
Prisca Thévenot, a former junior minister for youth who is seen as a rising star in Macron’s centrist grouping, was given the key role of government spokesperson.
Other top ministers remained in place, including Bruno Le Maire at the finance ministry and Gérald Darmanin at the interior ministry.
Stéphane Séjourné, 38, a secretary general of Macron’s Renaissance party and the president’s chief European election strategist, was named foreign minister. Séjourné was in a civil partnership with Attal, France’s first out gay prime minister, but their relationship is believed to be over.
