NICE LUNCH

France’s students are protesting on the streets. The government is in crisis over its controversial youth employment law. The Taliban appear to be staging a comeback in Afghanistan. Iran is inching closer to becoming a nuclear power.





But on a glorious spring day in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, an idyllic coastal town in south-west France that on a tipsy afternoon could almost topple into Spain, Michele Alliot-Marie breezes into Chez Margot restaurant with a jolly word for everyone she passes and no obvious concerns.
In a crisp white blouse with a pale green jumper draped casually over her shoulders, Alliot-Marie appears the very model of good humour and calm restraint, which, I guess, is reassuring since she is the defence minister of a nuclear weapons state. As the former head of France’s Gaullist RPR (Rally for the Republic) party and a senior minister, she is France’s most powerful woman, a strong contender to be the next prime minister and an outside bet to succeed her political mentor Jacques Chirac as the country’s president (although her tangential involvement in the country’s latest political scandal, known as the Clearstream affair, may be scrambling that calculus).
Universally known as MAM (her initials), she has won the grudging admiration of the army’s top brass thanks to her willingness to mix with the troops - by parachuting out of aeroplanes and visiting the special forces in Afghanistan at Christmas - and her skills in arm-wrestling bigger military budgets out of her government colleagues.
She doesn’t care for conventional feminist measures, such as quotas for women in politics, and clearly hasn’t needed them: she is the first woman to represent her Basque country region, to lead a major French party and become defence minister. Fond of trouser suits, she was, so the story goes, once barred from entering the national assembly by an attendant who said only gentlemen could go in wearing trousers. “Are you asking me to take them off?” she asked, sailing on inside. (Chirac obviously wished she had since, as he told her later, she had “the best legs in the party”.)
Sitting down at a corner table on a shady, open-air veranda with a sublime view across the bay, Alliot-Marie swaps her sunglasses for a pair of rimless spectacles and welcomes me to France’s Basque country. “It is wonderful to arrive here when all week you have had telegrams, problems, crises, terrorist threats. One can regain one’s equilibrium here,” she says with a radiant smile. Like most French politicians, Alliot-Marie remains deeply rooted in the countryside and visits Saint-Jean-de-Luz, where she was previously mayor, at least twice a month. She remains the town’s deputy mayor and on Saturdays meets her constituents to discuss pressing issues: the recent ceasefire by Eta, the Basque separatist group in Spain, and market prices for the region’s cheeses and black cherries. She also finds time to watch rugby matches in the villages where all generations and all classes come together to share a common passion. “That is the France I like to see,” says Alliot-Marie, whose father was a local politician and international rugby referee.
The waitress arrives and describes the restaurant’s specialities, notably seafood caught in the nearby waters, which sounds so good as to render the formal menu superfluous. Alliot-Marie explains that, as a visiting journalist, I am new to the region and, consequently, I am plied with local aperitifs, wines and digestifs, some of which never register on the bill. The defence minister sticks to sparkling water.
I recount a conversation I had that morning on the way to the airport with a 65-year-old female taxi driver, who had bemoaned the work-shy nature of her compatriots and had recounted the horrors of living in the Parisian suburbs during the recent rioting. She had, however, asked me to convey her respects to Alliot-Marie, whom she described as a “fine role model for all French women and the only competent minister in the government”.
Alliot-Marie laughs at the compliment but as a good team player she immediately defends the government’s handling of the riots that raged through the suburbs in November. She blames most of the violence on small groups of drug dealers who exploited simmering social discontents and treated the riots almost as a game. While visiting Rueil-Malmaison, a town just outside Paris where her husband Patrick Ollier is mayor, Alliot-Marie talked to disaffected youths and listened to intercepted telephone conversations between the gang leaders. “They had a challenge between different districts as to who could burn the most cars. They would say: ‘I’ve burned seven! How many have you burned? I’m the chief!’ It was very violent but very limited.”
Our entrees arrive. While Alliot-Marie elegantly consumes a plateful of oysters, I tackle some grilled langoustines with an array of instruments that could have graced a medieval torture chamber. I experiment on the unfortunate crustaceans with a nutcracker and an impaling stick before deciding that a traditional knife and fork is the safer option - even at the loss of some of the delicious meat inside the langoustines’ crunchier extremities.
In a political essay Alliot-Marie published recently (the telltale sign of ambition in any French politician), she argued that “national cohesion” was a concern for the defence minister. I ask her what she meant by the remark. She launches into a spirited exposition of republican values and Gaullist ideals, denouncing communautarisme (the politics of special treatment for minority communities) for creating dangerous barriers between the state and the individual. She argues that if different communities in society are allowed to live by different rules, tensions and eventually conflicts will arise. Every citizen, regardless of race, background or religion must have exactly the same opportunities and responsibilities and be treated equally by the state.
That is why she disagrees with positive discrimination, a subject close to the heart of Nicolas Sarkozy, the populist president of the ruling centre-right UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) party who is currently elbowing aside all rivals as he strives to be the Gaullist right’s presidential candidate.
We discuss how a society can justify giving privileges to every child who lives in a deprived area - including the offspring of middle class teachers - while denying them to the daughter of a poor, immigrant cleaning lady who lives in the rich, 7th arrondissement in Paris. “What we must do is to come up with a system of aid that helps those who have difficulty in understanding and are slow at picking things up and do this in all schools, whatever the level of the school or wherever they live. That is national cohesion,” she explains.
It quickly becomes clear that the defence minister takes an interest in a lot of subjects beyond her formal portfolio, including the security of food supplies and the Common Agricultural Policy. With an ever-expanding population and a diminishing amount of cultivable land thanks to global warming, the world’s food supplies will become a crucial strategic issue, she predicts. “When Tony Blair says the CAP is passe he is completely wrong,” she says.
“The wars of tomorrow will be wars for water, energy, and perhaps food. Therefore this is a question for the defence minister because this is a strategic issue and the defence minister is responsible for avoiding wars,” she says with a grin.
Food shortages seem an incongruous subject as we tuck into exquisitely cooked sea bass. Buoyed by the peppery Txakoli wine, I ask if she thinks France was right to have opposed the Iraq war. “That’s hardly worth saying,” she replies. “Unfortunately a number of things we dreaded have come to pass.”
But if, as she then argues, the consequences of turmoil in Iraq are so grave, why doesn’t France do more to help stabilise the country? It is the very presence of occupying foreign troops that is aggravating the problem, she counters.
And what can be done to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions? Alliot-Marie admits it is extremely difficult to negotiate with a country that makes contradictory declarations in successive breaths. “It would be very dangerous if this country had nuclear arms. Iran must abide by the engagements that it has signed,” she says.
Unlike some French politicians, Alliot-Marie is far from being a reflexive critic of President George W. Bush; indeed she has worked hard to improve trans-Atlantic relations since the Iraq war. But she suggests that some in the US see the world as they would like to see it rather than as it is, and warns of the dangers of military action against Iran. “If ever, for one reason or another, the US were to intervene in Iran, then the problem would be that public opinion in the Arab world - even among those who do not like the Iranians and are afraid of them - would sympathise with Iran. There would be a risk of possibly starting a clash of civilisations that we have all done everything to avoid for a thousand years.”
The (complimentary) cheese course arrives: three Basque cheeses, one produced that day, one produced a year ago and one four years ago. All are accompanied by a black cherry compote. A glass of red wine also appears. It seems churlish to refuse.
Even when I disagree with Alliot-Marie’s arguments, I cannot but help admire the eloquence with which the former barrister and law professor argues her case, and her eagerness to engage the public. “People today are educated. They will no longer accept simply being considered as the objects of decisions,” the minister says.
Such rhetoric surely points towards a bid for the presidency in 2007. “I do not exclude anything. But I do not think that is today’s issue. What interests me is to defend my convictions and my ideas. What interests me is to ensure that they prevail,” she says.
As we gaze across the shimmering bay while drinking coffee (and, in my case, sampling a Patxaran aniseed digestif), she muses: “I think the first duty of the next president will be to try to make the French people recognise all the assets that they have and to take pride in their country.”

Having lunch at the remarkable Chez Margot is not a bad place to start.

John Thornhill is editor of the FT’s European edition.

Chez Margot, Ciboure, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France

6 x small oysters
1 x plate of grilled langoustines
2 x sea bass
1 x bottle of Txakoli
2 x coffee
Total: €95