Rachida Dati has resigned as culture minister to focus on her campaign to be elected mayor of Paris, which she describes as “the battle of my life”.
Dati said on Wednesday evening that she had submitted her resignation to President Emmanuel Macron, less than three weeks before the first round of voting in the mayoral race on 15 March.
“Paris is the commitment of a lifetime for me. I have the energy, determination and resolve needed to transform the city and meet the challenges ahead,” she said in a statement.
In an interview with BFMTV, she said the coming weeks, “will be decisive for Paris and for my candidacy. The battle of my life is Paris”, insisting that she is “going to change Paris and the lives of Parisians”.
The conservative politician, who is facing corruption charges and due to stand trial in the autumn, is backed by the conservative Les Républicains and centrist MoDem parties.
Among her main proposals are plans to double the number of municipal police officers to 5,000 and arm them, halt construction of new social housing in order to invest in renovating existing council housing, and reintroduce a four-day school week.
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On the campaign trail, Dati has largely avoided speaking to mainstream media and has declined to debate the other candidates, instead running an active campaign featuring videos from the field with city workers.
Macron’s office said he had accepted her resignation as culture minister and thanked her for “the valuable work she has carried out in the service of the French people over the past two years”, adding that he offered her his “full support in the fight she is waging”.
Dati, one of the few ministers to have survived a series of cabinet reshuffles since January 2024, said that despite budget cuts she had managed to limit the damage to the cultural sector.
Her tenure as minister was marked by turbulence at Paris’ Louvre Museum, including the fallout from a dramatic jewellery heist in October and a series of strikes by staff over the museum’s management.
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An Ifop poll published on Monday showed that Dati could win 30 percent of the vote in the first round of the election, placing her just behind the left-wing candidate Emmanuel Grégoire and making her the likely winner in the second round run-off.
(with newswires)
