TWO days after France rejected the European constitution, President Chirac appointed Dominique de Villepin, his most loyal protégé, to the post of Prime Minister yesterday and promised new energy to cut unemployment.

Severely discredited by the 55 per cent vote against the constitution in Sunday’s referendum, M Chirac called on France to rally in the national interest behind the new Government, led by the man who made his name in 2003 as the Foreign Minister who fronted France’s fight against the US plan to invade Iraq.

M de Villepin, 51, who has never been elected to any office, would lead a campaign to curb France’s chronically high unemployment, which has stood at about 10 per cent for the past 15 years. M Chirac said: “This struggle requires national mobilisation. It will be enacted resolutely in accordance with the French model and not the Anglo-Saxon type of model, but this does not mean standing still.”

The allusion went to the heart of France’s revolt against the EU constitution, which was rejected largely because voters saw it as a Trojan horse for the reviled Anglo-American free market doctrines that have come to prevail in the Union.

At the same time, M Chirac announced that he had brought back into the Cabinet Nicolas Sarkozy, 50, the leader of his Union for a Popular Majority, his chief rival and by far the most popular member of his centre-right political camp. M Sarkozy, who is expected to take over his old job as Interior Minister, is his party’s most ardent advocate of the so-called Anglo-Saxon model that the President promised to shun.

M Chirac said that he understood the feeling of dissatisfaction with France, as it had been led by the Government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the outgoing Prime Minister. It was time to kickstart the economy with respect for the “French model” and France must refuse to turn its back on Europe despite the referendum, the President said.

The appointment of the flamboyant M de Villepin, a diplomat, poet and writer, had been expected after the resignation of M Raffarin, 56, who had been Prime Minister since M Chirac’s re-election in 2002. Deeply unpopular for the past two years, the hapless M Raffarin fulfilled the tradition in which French Presidents require their prime ministers to carry the can for unpopular government policies.

M Raffarin said yesterday that he notified M Chirac of his resignation on May 18, ten days before the referendum. The President paid tribute to him, saying that he had reformed the State and set the scene for France’s economic relaunch.

M de Villepin becomes the third Prime Minister of France’s 48-year-old Fifth Republic never to have stood for elected office.

A change of government became urgent after voters, in a heavy turnout, rejected the constitution by 55 per cent to 45 per cent, venting their wrath not just against Europe but against M Chirac and the political establishment that had been urging them to vote “yes”.

M Chirac had first offered the Prime Minister’s job to M Sarkozy on Monday, but the former Interior and Finance Minister, who wants to become President, had demanded freedom to govern without presidential interference, political sources said. M Chirac refused.

M de Villepin, a former Foreign Minister, has orders to revitalise the Government. He is a believer in the Gaullist model of “French exception” in which the State retains a big hand in running the economy, the people pay high taxes and enjoy generous healthcare, pensions and unemployment benefit. He has recently called for a “new impetus” to overcome the feeling of impotence that he says France is suffering. His Cab inet is to be announced today.

The appointment of M Sarkozy surprised the political world because the star of the Centre Right and rival to Chirac is certain to assert himself as the Cabinet strongman, eclipsing M de Villepin. The pair have been in conflict for the past three years. M Sarkozy, a pragmatic moderniser, has lately blamed French unemployment on the country’s tax-heavy welfare system and pleaded for France to adapt its cherished social model to the market-driven world.

Opposition leaders said that M de Villepin’s appointment showed that President Chirac had still not listened to the voters’ cry of despair and anger last Sunday and in elections since he was re-elected in 2002. “This is the same bunch,” Jean-Marc Ayrault, parliamentary leader of the Socialist Party, said. “You do not treat a crisis of state with Elastoplast.”

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