Speaking for la France profonde

Philip Delves Broughton meets Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the French Premier, a man who challenges the snobbery and piety of his country's political establishment Jong ears, in the Buddhist tradi

tion, hold the promise of prosperity and longevity. JeanPierre Raffarin, the French Prime Minister, has ears which all but dangle from his square, boxer's head, as if pulled into their present shape by years of wearing heavy earrings. His nose is squashed almost into a hook, the result of rugby injuries, his back hunched and his belly round, forming a pear-shaped silhouette.

I arrived early the other day at the Hotel Matignon, his official residence, for lunch with 13 other journalists from the old Europe of 15 member states. Raffarin was to be both our host and the representative of France. In a salon on the first floor, the tall windows gave on to a stretch of emerald lawn. The trees were flowering and a platoon of gardeners fussed around in preparation for the summer parties to come. Even with a lamentable 30 per cent popularity rating, back-stabbers at large within his own party and the stench of death enveloping his career, Raffarin did not seem so badly off.

Once his guests had arrived, Raffarin rolled into the room. With barely a preliminary word, he stretched out his short arms and his thick, sausagy fingers and emitted a hungry 'a table'. Rarely for a French politician, he is almost entirely without piety. He is not given to homilies or, it seems, much vanity. He has a wicked smile and a natural sympathy which must make him a gifted breaker of had news.

He was a surprise appointment as Prime Minister in 2002. He was a powerful local figure, president of the regional council of Poitou-Charentes in western France, but his only experience of national government was as small-business minister between 1995 and 1997. Chirac chose him because he wanted someone from outside the Parisian elite, who did not attend the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, who could help the president assuage his haute bourgeois guilt. Raffarin in appearance and style was to be the ordinary Frenchman's friend.

Barely had he taken up his post than the sniping began. Jean-Louis Debre, the speaker of the French parliament and son of the former prime minister Michel Debre, sneered that Raffarin was a `boutiquier'. All the snobs on the Right tittered

about this sturdy provincial whose tenure, they predicted, was another moment of Chirac madness, soon to be rectified with his replacement by one of their own.

But Raffarin has absorbed the blows. After his party was drubbed in last month's regional elections, he offered Chirac his resignation, but was refused. The following day Le Monde predicted Raffarin was simply being kept on to take the next electoral pounding, in June's European elections, before finally being booted out. It would be a great shame if he was.

French politics is currently the story of five men. The first is Chirac, who has retreated into a kind of guru role, surveying French politics from on high and intervening only occasionally to offer little sermons on how life and politics are a long game which reward the patient and true. The second is Alain Juppe, the former heir apparent, now disgraced by a conviction for using government money to pay party flunkeys. Juppe is Chirac's brain and messenger on earth, able to implement the President's messy dreams and machinations.

The third and fourth are the big beasts of the cabinet, Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin. Sarkozy, now the finance minister, makes no secret of his desire to succeed Chirac in 2007, despite the fact that Chirac shows every sign of wanting to remain in the Elysee as long as he draws breath. Watching and listening to Sarkozy is like standing in front of a blast furnace, so burning is his ambition.

De Villepin, the interior minister, is another Chirac pet, drawn from the diplomatic ranks to hold the highest offices of state. He has never held an elected post, but can get Chirac's blood going with a highly intellectual French romanticism. He speaks a mile a minute, elucidating every point with quotes from his favourite poets and thinkers. He is your classic brilliant Frenchman, and shamelessly so.

Then there is Raffarin, the eye of this storm. Where de Villepin plunders Chateaubriand for his bons mots, Raffarin draws from the quaint tales of Lamartine. Where Sarkozy promises dynamism, Raffarin says his greatest quality is serenity. He claims to speak for `la France d'en bas', a phrase he says the press often misinterprets to mean ordinary or poor Frenchmen. Rather, he says, it means the French who feel unspoken for, whose words or causes are lost in the cacophony of official spokesmen from unions, parties and organisations which dominate the media. 'I listen to people who struggle to get themselves heard,' he says.

Raffarin's political idol was and remains Valery Giscard d'Estaing, whose career has taught him of the fickleness of politics. The Raffarins held a private dinner at the Matignon to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Giscard's ascent to the presidency in 1974. Giscard considers Chirac a lightweight, careerist buffoon, and when he sees Raffarin he asks sarcastically, 'So how is the visionary?' There has always been an honesty to Giscard's aristocratic hauteur, while Chirac is a manic stool-straddler, a Parisian rich kid who plays the farmer's friend, an intellectual phoney who late in his career wants voters to believe that age has granted him wisdom. Raffarin's proximity to Giscard adds to his outsider status in the present government.

'I know that politics is tragic because man's fate is tragic,' said Raffarin at our lunch. 'Politics isn't Real Madrid versus Barcelona. It isn't sport. Society is violent and politicians must suffer.' He said that the victory the French gave Giscard in 1974 was a 'victory of suffering'. Assessing his own abysmal popularity rating, he charted an undulating line in the air. 'It can go like this, but over time, I think, the trajectory of a career is flat, good or bad.' Asked if he dreaded having to leave the Matignon, he said, 'I'm not here to last, I'm here to do.'

Last year, just after the United States invaded Iraq, Dominique de Villepin, then foreign minister, addressed Paris's foreign press corps. With his arms windrnilling and his fleshy lips pouring forth arguments as to why the invasion was a terrible idea, he began almost to shout. 'We in France recognise that the fate of man is tragic. Humanity is dark.'

It is clearly an axiom in France that politics is not the art of the possible, but rather the business of dealing with the awful and the inevitable, handling man's vices and if possible, like Jean-Pierre Raffarin, remaining Zen in the midst of them.