Philippe Séguin

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Philippe Séguin in November 2005

Philippe Séguin [ se.gɛ̃ ] (born April 21, 1943 in Tunis , † January 7, 2010 in Paris ) was a French politician. In his career he was Minister of Labor and Social Affairs (1986–88), President of the National Assembly (1993–97), and chairman of the Gaullist RPR party (1997–99). From July 21, 2004 until his death he was President of the French Court of Auditors, Cour des comptes .

Origin and education

Séguin's parents were French settlers ( pieds-noirs ) in what was then the French protectorate of Tunisia. The father Robert Séguin served in the 4e régiment de tirailleurs tunisiens (4th Tunisian rifle regiment ) and fought on the side of the Forces françaises libres under Charles de Gaulle in World War II . It fell in September 1944 during the liberation of France . Séguin therefore had the status of a pupille de la Nation ("ward of the nation", ie war orphans under state care). On November 11, 1949, at the age of six and a half, he accepted the military medals in Tunis that had been awarded posthumously to his father, who had died five years earlier during the liberation of France.

Séguin attended the Lycée Carnot in Tunis. After Tunisia gained independence in 1956, his mother moved with him to the south of France, where he attended the Lycée Alphonse Daudet in Nîmes and the Lycée in Draguignan . He studied history at the Ecole normal d'instituteurs in the Var department and at the University of Aix-en-Provence , graduating with a license and a diplômé d'études supérieures (DES). He graduated from the Institut d'études politiques d'Aix-en-Provence (Sciences Po Aix) and the elite university École nationale d'administration as a member of the “Robespierre” class (January 1968 to May 1970), so he was a fellow student of Jacques Attali and Louis Schweitzer . After graduating, he became a commissioner at the Cour des Comptes (Court of Auditors). From 1971 to 1977 he also taught as a lecturer at Sciences Po de Paris .

Beginnings in politics

Séguin developed into an ardent Gaullist and at every opportunity conjured up great figures in national history such as Joan of Arc , Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle with clanging rhetoric . In 1965 he joined the Gaullist party Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR), from which the Union pour la défense de la République (UDR) emerged in 1968 . From 1973 he worked in the General Secretariat of the Presidential Office under President Georges Pompidou . During Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's presidency , he became Deputy Head of Sport in the Ministry of Quality of Life in 1974, before returning to the Court of Auditors in 1975. The Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) emerged from the UDR in 1976 under the leadership of Jacques Chirac . 1977/78 he worked on the staff of Prime Minister Raymond Barre .

MP, Mayor and Minister

In the parliamentary elections in 1978, Séguin was elected to the National Assembly as a member of the 1st constituency of the Vosges department , and in 1981 he was re-elected. He then was Vice President of the National Assembly until 1986. From 1983 to 1997 he was mayor of the city of Épinal . Under Prime Minister Jacques Chirac , he was Minister for Social Affairs and Employment (Ministre des Affaires sociales et de l'Emploi) from 1986 to 1988 .

After the change of government in 1988 he took up his mandate again. He applied for the chairmanship of the RPR parliamentary group, but was defeated by one vote difference to Bernard Pons , the favorite of party chairman Chirac. Within the RPR, Séguin was the leader of the wing of the "social Gaullists", which is why they were also called "séguinistes" . At the party congress in Le Bourget in February 1990, he and Charles Pasqua presented a draft program that called for a return to the populist and social principles of Gaullism and rejected further expansion of European institutions. This proposal was supported by 31.4% of the delegates. A two-thirds majority, however, supported Chirac and Alain Juppé . Séguin and Pasqua were also spokesmen for opponents of the EU Maastricht Treaty (1992) in the party.

Speaker of Parliament and Chairman of the Party

From 1993 to 1997 Séguin was President of the French National Assembly .

In February 1994 (a good year before the presidential election , in which François Mitterrand did not run again), Der Spiegel wrote :

“Philippe Seguin was the spokesman for the French opponents of the Maastricht Treaty, who lost just under 48.95 percent in the European referendum on September 20, 1992. The campaign, which culminated in a TV debate with President Francois Mitterrand, made the former Minister of Social Affairs a national figure. A year after the referendum, 54 percent of the French on the Seguin Line against Maastricht in polls. (…) Seguin (…) represents a Gaullism open to the left. His protectionist tendencies have led the Mayor of Epinal, who Le Monde calls 'le colosse', to accuse him of nationalism and populism. After the right-wing electoral victory in March 1993, the popular, self-confident nonconformist accepted the office of President of Parliament instead of a ministry. From this politically neutral base, Seguin, 50, could become the right-wing compromise candidate for the 1995 presidential elections - if the top candidates Jacques Chirac and Édouard Balladur block each other. "

In fact, both Chirac and Balladur ran for the presidential election. Séguin supported the candidacy of the ultimately victorious Jacques Chirac, who approached social Gaullism in the election campaign, but then appointed the liberal reformer Alain Juppé as prime minister rather than Séguin. Juppé, as Chirac's successor, was also chairman of the RPR. After the defeat of the center-right parties in the 1997 parliamentary elections , in which Séguin defended his seat, he and the party wing of Balladur and Nicolas Sarkozy called for the resignation of party chairman Juppé. Subsequently, an extraordinary party congress on July 6, 1997 elected Séguin with 78.85% of the delegate's votes (with five opposing candidates) as chairman of the RPR. He resigned from his position as Mayor of Épinal in November 1997.

Séguin had the statutes of the party changed and introduced a primary election of the chairman by the members. Such a primary election took place for the first time on December 13, 1998: Séguin was the only candidate and was confirmed in office with 95.07% of the votes. In February 1999 he was selected as his party's top candidate for the 1999 European elections . On April 16, 1999, however, he resigned from the party leadership and also renounced the candidacy in the EU election. Unlike his former comrade Charles Pasqua, Séguin did not switch to the sovereignist Rassemblement pour la France (RPF), but remained loyal to the RPR.

In the local elections in March 2001, he ran unsuccessfully for the office of Mayor of Paris. Séguin was the official candidate of the center-right parties RPR, UDF and DL . However, against him stood the incumbent Jean Tiberi , who had been expelled from the RPR after a financial scandal. So the bourgeois camp was divided. Séguin got 25.7% in the first ballot and 33.4% in the second. Bertrand Delanoë won the election and became the capital's first socialist mayor. Séguin was, however, elected to the parish council of Paris, where he took over the chairmanship of the RPR group. In June 2002 he resigned from the National Assembly. Because of differences of opinion with his party, Séguin withdrew from active politics in October 2002 and also resigned from his seat on the Paris municipal council. He had already resumed his work at the Court of Auditors in September 2002.

President of the Court of Auditors

Séguin in 2005

In 2004 he became President of the Court of Auditors . Séguin was appointed by then President Jacques Chirac on the proposal of Nicolas Sarkozy . In 2007, after his election as President , Sarkozy offered him to become Minister in the Fillon II Cabinet under Prime Minister François Fillon . Séguin refused and preferred to remain President of the Court of Auditors. In February 2008 Séguin became chairman of the stadium commission for the 2016 European football championship .

On the night of January 6th to 7th, 2010, Séguin died of a heart attack. In the media he was recognized as an important representative of a Eurosceptic minority within his party.

The then President Nicolas Sarkozy appointed the politician Didier Migaud (* 1952) as his successor .

Works

  • C'est quoi, la politique? Paris 1999, ISBN 2-226-11019-4 .
  • Why France wants Europe. 1996, ISBN 3-421-05062-7 .
  • Discours encore et toujours républicains: de l'exception française. Paris 1994, ISBN 2-207-24304-4 .
  • Itinéraire dans la France d'en bas, d'en haut et d'ailleurs. Éditions du Seuil, Paris.
  • Un premier président dans la République: Discours 2004–2009. Preface by Didier Magaud. La Documentation Française Publishing House, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-11-008477-4 .

Web links

Commons : Philippe Séguin  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Philippe Seguin . In: Der Spiegel . No. 8 , 1994, pp. 142 ( Online - Feb. 21, 1994 ).
  2. ↑ a b c Romain Leick: Bite and scratch . In: Der Spiegel . No. 10 , 2001 ( online - March 5, 2001 ).
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Les grandes dates de la carrière de Philippe Séguin. In: Le Parisien , January 7, 2010.
  4. ↑ Andrea Ceron: Leaders, Factions and the Game of Intra-Party Politics. 2019.
  5. ↑ Udo Kempf: From de Gaulle to Chirac. The French political system. 3rd edition, Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen 1997, p. 188.
  6. ^ Jochen Schmidt: Rassemblement pour la République (RPR). In: Sabine Ruß u. a .: parties in France. Continuity and Change in the Fifth Republic. Leske + Budrich, Opladen 2000, pp. 197-219, on p. 202.
  7. ↑ Philippe Séguin accede à la présidence du RPR sous étroite surveillance. In: Les Échos , July 7, 1997.
  8. ↑ Béatrice Gurrey: Philippe Séguin, Raminagrobis à la Cour des comptes . In: Le Monde . November 9, 2005 ( online ).
  9. ^ Died: Philippe Séguin . In: Der Spiegel . No. 2 , 2010, p. 142 ( Online - Jan. 10, 2010 , obituary).
personal data
SURNAME Séguin, Philippe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician, minister, President of the National Assembly, Chairman of the Gaullist Party and the Court of Auditors
DATE OF BIRTH April 21, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Tunis
DATE OF DEATH January 7, 2010
Place of death Paris