Quotes of the Day

In the strange power vacuum before June's parliamentary elections, Alain Juppé, 56, is playing several parts in a political version of The Wizard of Oz. He is the man behind the curtain, having engineered the current placeholder government as the best advertisement for a conservative victory. Depending on your politics, he's either the Wicked Witch of the West or the good one of the East. Memories of his ham-handed reform efforts as Prime Minister from 1995 to '97 could even serve as a convenient scarecrow for the left. No one would suggest, though, that he lacks a brain.

It was Juppé, considered the designated dauphin of President Jacques Chirac, who convinced his mentor to choose Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a genial provincial, as Prime Minister over urban ideologue Nicolas Sarkozy. It was he who maneuvered a captain of industry, steelmaker Francis Mer, rather than a government mandarin into the finance minister's job. Most importantly, Juppé was the prime mover behind the Union for the Presidential Majority, an attempt to mend the longstanding fissures on the French right. Since the presidential elections, Juppé has rarely ventured out for public events from his bastion in Bordeaux, where he has served as mayor since 1995. Why the reticence?

Simple: as an enarque, or graduate of the élite Ecole Nationale d'Administration (like Chirac and ex-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin), Juppé is smart enough to know that his sort is the wrong sort in France's current climate. Should that fact fade somehow from his mind, the President's wife, Bernadette Chirac, was there to remind him last week, pointing out the virtue that Raffarin's government contains fewer enarques not only than the Jospin government, but also than the previous one headed by Juppé.

With that, France's First Lady put her finger on a wound still tender five years later. Juppé's short tenure as Prime Minister was marred by crushing general strikes after an ill-prepared and technocratic attempt to reform the country's social security and pension schemes. "He was very reformist, very liberal and very maladroit," says political analyst Alain Duhamel. The memory of those divisive years still adheres to Juppé and prevents him from playing a more public role in government now.

It won't forever. "He's holding himself in reserve for the clear objective of the presidency in 2007," says René Rémond, president of the National Foundation of Political Science. If the conservatives win a majority in the parliamentary elections, Juppé's next step toward that goal is likely to be leader of the majority faction in parliament.

In time, that party will have to invent a loftier name for itself than the baldly utilitarian Union for the Presidential Majority. But whatever the handle, Juppé will be wanting to preserve it for precisely that purpose in 2007.

• JAMES GRAFF/Paris
• Juppe playing several parts