French Premier Is Lobbying for a More Flattering Image

The French have got him all wrong, Prime Minister Alain Juppe has been insisting. Coldblooded technocrat? Mais non.

In truth, France’s head of government and former foreign minister asserts, he is a gourmand and a naive romantic, a timid soul with an eye for the ladies who often feels the pangs of solitude.

With abysmally low approval ratings that make him perhaps the most unpopular prime minister of the French Fifth Republic, Juppe, an academic highflier and gifted administrator who is a friend and ally of President Jacques Chirac, has been arduously working to reinvent his image.

“I love to seduce,” Juppe told two prominent female writers who lunched with him in Bordeaux, where he is also mayor.

That tete-a-tete over oysters on the half shell and white wine spawned a flattering article in the fashion magazine Elle, a publication the 51-year-old Juppe claimed to read regularly.

Since being named prime minister by Chirac in May 1995, Juppe has become a political punching bag amid the implementation of presidential policies that include cutting deficits and trying to get the French economy in shape for the single European currency.

A major initiative by Juppe to swell the employment rolls badly misfired, and France now has more than 3 million jobless, a 5% increase in a year.

“His policies are not optimistic like Clinton’s,” said Jean-Marc Lech, head of the French polling organization Ipsos. “It’s all about suffering and belt-tightening. The French see him as some kind of sadist who is putting them through grief while telling them to stop whining.”

In a book he released last month that is topping bestseller lists, Juppe is at pains to show a different side of himself. Intentionally or not, the picture that emerges is one of a man who believes he is often misunderstood and who has a thin skin for the rough and tumble of French politics.

When a woman shouts “Death to the jerk!” in a Bordeaux street, Juppe writes, he instinctively knows she is referring to him.

The 117-page volume, titled “Entre Nous” (Between Us), is a blend of diary, confession, political manifesto and argument for the defense. Some commentators have scoffed at such a political striptease, but it’s in keeping with recent acts by other French leaders. Former President Francois Mitterrand, who died in January 1996, kept a journalist at his side during the final years of his life, and the literary result of those encounters has just hit French bookshops.

Juppe’s favorable ratings in the polls began dropping a year ago and sagged to 26% this month. Government officials confirm that members of Chirac’s entourage are arguing in favor of ditching Juppe, but the president last month expressed confidence in his prime minister.

In his book, Juppe confidently predicts that his government will remain in office until the next parliamentary elections, in March 1988.

“I love power,” Juppe admits in the book. “Not its pomp and circumstance--the effective power to solve a problem.” He allows that he is “impulsive, a bit imperialist, too demanding” but notes that even a graduate of France’s elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration like himself is a human being.

And the stereotype of him as a technocrat without feeling is just not true, Juppe has protested. As a youngster in southwestern France, he wanted to be a doctor but changed his mind after visiting a hospital. He couldn’t stand the smell of alcohol and blood, or the sight of surgical instruments.