François Léotard

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François Léotard (2011)

François Léotard (born March 26, 1942 in Cannes ) is a French politician. He was mayor of Fréjus from 1977 to 1997 ; Minister of Culture from 1986 to 1988 and Minister of Defense from 1993 to 1995; and from 1996 to 1998 chairman of the UDF .

Origin, education, profession

François Léotard is the son of André Léotard , who was a civil servant at the Court of Auditors and from 1959–71 mayor of Fréjus. The father was a monarchist and supporter of the integral nationalism of Charles Maurras . The singer and actor Philippe Léotard (1940-2001) was his brother. He attended the Lycée Charlemagne . In protest against the Algerian war , the law student joined the Parti socialiste unifié (PSU) from 1961-62 . In 1964 he retired to the Benedictine monastery of la Pierre-Qui-Vire for a year .

In 1968 he became secretary of the foreign ministry and from 1971 to 1973 attended the École nationale d'administration (ENA; as a classmate of Laurent Fabius , Gérard Longuet and Odon Vallet ). He then worked until 1975 on the staff of the Prefect of Paris , where he was responsible for urban planning and the environment; then with the Prefect of Dordogne . From 1976 to 1977 he was a member of the staff of Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski , who in turn was a close confidante of President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing .

Political career

Léotard in 1988

Poniatowski moved Léotard to move from administration to politics. He joined the Parti républicain (PR), was elected mayor of Fréjus in 1977 and a member of the National Assembly the following year , where he represented a constituency of the Var department . He belonged to the parliamentary group of the Union pour la démocratie française (UDF), a party alliance to which the PR belonged and which supported the presidency of Giscard d'Estaing. He was re-elected as a member of parliament five times and served in parliament until 2001, with interruptions when he was in government.

Léotard was elected Secretary General of PR in 1982. He prevailed in a vote against Charles Millon , which established a long-standing rivalry between the two politicians. The group of younger PR executives - besides Léotard in particular Gérard Longuet, Alain Madelin , Claude Malhuret - was called "bande à Léo" in the press at the time . It led the party in a more conservative and economically liberal direction. From 1986 to 1988 he was Minister of Culture and Communication in Cohabitations - Cabinet Chirac II . In this position he pushed through the privatization of the TV channel TF1 .

In 1988 he became chairman of the Parti républicain. Léotard was a staunch opponent of the right-wing extremist Front National (FN), which had a stronghold in his home department of Var. In 1990 Gérard Longuet replaced him as party leader. From 1993 to 1995 Léotard was Minister of Defense in the Balladur cabinet (the second cohabitation). In this position he was responsible for realigning French security policy after the end of the Cold War. For the first time since France withdrew from the military integration of NATO during de Gaulle's presidency in 1966, he made active French troops available to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR). He also issued security guarantees for the countries bordering Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). In January 1994 the idea of ​​a treaty between NATO and the Western European Union (WEU) on the one hand and Russia on the other hand was launched.

In the 1995 presidential election , Léotard voted for Édouard Balladur , while ex-President Giscard d'Estaing supported Jacques Chirac's candidacy . This led to the split of the Giscard loyalists from the PR. In June of the same year Léotard was re-elected party chairman. He had three coronary artery bypasses the following month . He also remained mayor of Fréjus until 1997. As the successor to Giscard d'Estaing, Léotard was chairman of the UDF from 1996 to 1998. The PR renamed itself in 1997 to Démocratie Libérale (DL) and Alain Madelin became party chairman.

In the regional election in his home region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur , Léotard was the top candidate of the bourgeois parties (UDF and RPR) in 1998. However, their list came in third behind the Left Bloc and Front National. Unlike UDF candidates in other regions (including Charles Millon in Rhône-Alpes ), Léotard rejected any cooperation with the FN and instead allowed the socialist Michel Vauzelle to be elected regional president . When the DL broke away from the UDF after the regional elections, Léotard stayed in the latter. To this end, he founded the small party Pôle républicain indépendant et libéral (PRIL) together with Gilles de Robien , Alain Lamassoure and Gérard Longuet . He passed the chairmanship of the UDF to François Bayrou . In August 1998, Léotard was charged with money laundering in the scandal over illegal party funding of the former PR. In November 1998 the PRIL was incorporated into the Nouvelle UDF, which was no longer just a party alliance, but a unified party.

In the following period he gradually withdrew from politics. At the end of 2001 he was appointed inspecteur général des finances and resigned from his mandate. After the end of his term as a financial inspector, he founded in 2003 among others with Willy De Clercq , Ana de Palacio and Marco Pannella union MedBridge for exchange between Europe and the Middle East. In 2004, Léotard was sentenced to ten months suspended prison sentence for illegal political party financing and money laundering. Léotard has been on trial again since October 2019: together with former Prime Minister Édouard Balladur , he has been indicted before the Court of Justice of the Republic . The "Karachi Affair" about bribes when selling Agosta-class submarines to Pakistan goes back to Léotard's tenure as Defense Minister (1993–95).

literature

Web links

Commons : François Léotard  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ François Léotard, l'ami qui ne veut plus aucun bien à Sarkozy. In: Nouvel Obs , March 6, 2008.
  2. ↑ Maurice Rajsfus: Le travail à perpétuité. De la galère au journalisme. Manya, 1993.
  3. ↑ Eric De Saint Angel: Un jour, un destin: "les frères Léotard, à la vie, à la mort". In: TéléObs , October 30, 2013.
  4. ^ Anne Fulda: François Léotard, author désengagé. In: Le Figaro , February 6, 2007.
  5. ^ A b c d David S. Bell: Parties and Democracy in France. Parties Under Presidentialism. Ashgate, 2000, entry François Léotard .
  6. ^ Frédéric Tristram: Libéralisme. In: Jean Garrigues: La France de la Ve République, 1958–2008. Armand Colin, Paris 2008, p. 539.
  7. ↑ Michael Meimeth: France's changed relationship to NATO - old wine in new bottles? In: Frankreich-Jahrbuch 1998. Leske + Budrich, Opladen 1998, pp. 171–190, at pp. 179–180.
  8. ↑ Triple pontage corona rien pour François Leotard. In: Liberation , July 3, 1995.
  9. ^ Prison avec sursis pour Léotard. In: Le Parisien , February 17, 2004.
  10. ^ Affaire de Karachi: Balladur et Léotard comparaîtront devant la Cour de justice de la République. In: Le Monde , October 1, 2019.
  11. ^ Karachi submarine case: Balladur faces trial in France. BBC News, October 1, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Léotard, François
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician, member of the National Assembly
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Cannes