French Interior Minister Quits Over Corsica Issue

PARIS —  Leftist maverick Jean-Pierre Chevenement quit Tuesday as France’s minister for law and order, depriving Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s 3-year-old government of one of the last remaining stars from its starting lineup.

The mercurial interior minister, who twice before resigned ministerial portfolios and once rallied from a coma to return to public life, refused to endorse Jospin’s plan for devolving a share of legislative powers to local officials on the Mediterranean island of Corsica.

The issue may sound minor, but the question is really whether France, long a hyper-centralized state, should now devolve some power to Corsica or other regions with strong local peculiarities.

In the tradition of the Jacobins of the French Revolution, Chevenement, 61, favored a France “one and indivisible.” He also insisted that Corsican nationalists should have forsworn the use of violence before being allowed to take part in ongoing negotiations.

Jospin instead chose a talk-first policy without preconditions.

Though the premier and his interior minister have been friends for 35 years, it was becoming vital for Jospin to prevent discord on the issue of Corsica from overshadowing the achievements of his government, analysts said. Unemployment is down, growth is up, and Economy and Finance Minister Laurent Fabius is expected to announce a major tax cut Thursday.

Jospin is widely expected to challenge incumbent Jacques Chirac for the French presidency in less than two years. A poll published Tuesday found that 58% of respondents judge as positive the premier’s performance as leader of their government.

With Chevenement’s departure, Jospin’s Cabinet loses one of its most respected members, whose popularity bridges the nation’s customary left-right political divide.

In November, Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn left office after being implicated in a corruption scandal. In March, Jospin jettisoned longtime friend Claude Allegre as education minister after the latter’s harsh criticisms of the teaching establishment turned him into a political liability.

This autumn, Employment and Solidarity Minister Martine Aubry and possibly Justice Minister Elisabeth Guigou are expected to resign to be free to run in local elections next year.

“The dream team is only a shadow of what it used to be,” claimed the right-wing Le Figaro newspaper, no friend of the Socialists. “On the road of power, [Jospin] henceforth walks alone.”

The reason many of the French hold Chevenement in esteem is their belief that he sticks to his convictions in an era when such conduct has become a rarity in politics. Twice before, he walked away from power. In 1983, he resigned as minister of research when the Socialist government of the time made a policy U-turn in favor of austerity. An unabashed friend of Iraq, Chevenement quit as defense minister in 1991 to protest the French alliance with the United States in the war against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Two years later, he left the Socialist Party to head his own leftist splinter party, the Citizen’s Movement. Unlike the Socialists, he opposed the 1992 Maastricht Treaty for greater European unity, fearing that France’s sovereignty would be blunted. He also did not conceal his hostility to last year’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization airstrikes against Yugoslavia, an action in which French armed forces extensively participated.

In September 1998, Chevenement went into a coma because of an error in anesthesia as he was preparing to undergo surgery in a Paris hospital. He came close to death and for four months was unable to tend to his ministerial duties. His key role in the government, and as one of Jospin’s most trusted confidants, became very clear during his convalescence.

In a communique making Chevenement’s departure official, Jospin went out of his way Tuesday to express his esteem and friendship for his old Socialist Party comrade. The premier replaced him with another trusted ally, Daniel Vaillant, who had been in charge of relations with Parliament.