Jean Arthuis

Jean Arthuis (2007)

Jean Arthuis (born October 7, 1944 in Saint-Martin-du-Bois , Maine-et-Loire ) is a French central politician. Between 1983 and 2014 he was a senator several times and from 1995 to 1997 Minister of Economic Affairs and Finance. From 2014 to 2019 he was a member of the European Parliament.

education and profession

Jean Arthuis studied at the École supérieure de commerce de Nantes-Atlantique and at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris . He initially worked for an international auditing company until he founded his own auditing firm, Jean Arthuis & Associés, in 1971.

Political career

Political party

Arthuis began his political career as a member of the Christian Democratic Center des démocrates sociaux (CDS). From 1978 onwards, the CDS was part of the Union pour la démocratie française (UDF) founded under President Giscard d'Estaing , which was initially organized as a loose alliance of small centrist parties. A united party, the Nouvelle UDF, grew out of this alliance in 1998 .

After a long career as a representative of the Christian-social or social-liberal tendencies of the UDF, Arthuis became skeptical about the strategy of his party leader François Bayrou , who decided in 2007 to break the alliance with the liberal-conservative camp ( UMP ). However, he did not join the Nouveau Center , which supported the government of Nicolas Sarkozy , but remained a member of the UDF until its dissolution into the Mouvement démocrate (MoDem), the establishment of which he described in 2008 as a failure.

UDI representatives Jean-Louis Borloo , Olivier Richefou and Arthuis (from left to right), 2014

Since then, he has worked with his club Rassembler les Centristes ("The Centrists Gather") and his small party Alliance Centriste ("Centrist Alliance") on a reunification of the political center of France on the model of the UDF. In 2012 he was also involved in founding the Union des démocrates et indépendants (UDI), which pursues precisely this goal. He was expelled from the UDI in the run-up to the 2017 presidential election because he supported Emmanuel Macron's candidacy against the party line .

Since 2017 he has been a member of Macron's newly founded center party La République en Marche .

Local and departmental level

In 1971 he became mayor of the small town of Château-Gontier in the Mayenne department and held this office until 2001. At that time, it was possible to combine the mayor's office with functions at regional and national level.

In 1976 he became a member, in 1982 Deputy President and from 1992 to 2014 President of the General Council ( Conseil général ) of the Mayenne department. Then he was a member of the General Council until 2015, when he left.

National level

In 1983 he became Senator of Mayenne, in 1986 State Secretary in the Ministry of Labor and in 1987 in the Ministry of Economics and Finance in the UDF- RPR government of Jacques Chirac . After the defeat of the bourgeois camp in 1988, he initially restricted himself to local politics.

After Jacques Chirac was elected President in 1995, he returned to national politics and was first Minister for Planning and Economic Development, then from August 1995 Minister of Economics and Finance until the Socialists returned to government in 1997.

In 1998 he became chairman of the UDF parliamentary group in the Senate (Groupe Union centriste) after the liberal-conservative party rights ( Démocratie libérale ) split off under Alain Madelin . From 2002 to 2011 he was Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee .

European Parliament

In the 2014 European elections , Arthuis was elected to the European Parliament through the joint list of MoDem and UDI (“L'Alternative”) . There he joined the liberal ALDE group and was chairman of the budget committee . He was also the delegate for relations with Iran. After the 2019 European elections , he left the European Parliament.

swell

1. ↑ Jean Arthuis: s'engager pour agir! ( Memento of the original from December 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Jean Arthuis crée un parti centriste. In: Ouest France , September 27, 2013.
3. ^ Entry on Jean Arthuis in the European Parliament 's database of representatives

Web links

• French Senate information page on Jean Arthuis
• Jean Arthuis's blog
• Entry on Jean Arthuis in the database of Members of the European Parliament