Alliot-Marie out in Sarkozy’s reshuffle

By AGENCIES

PARIS: French President Nicolas Sarkozy has shuffled his Cabinet, jettisoning his foreign minister who had been roundly criticized for her closeness to Tunisia’s ousted regime.

The French leader went on prime-time TV Sunday to announce the changes to the top rungs of the government — just three months after his previous Cabinet reshuffling and with the presidential election ahead next year.

Sarkozy made no reference to Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who hours earlier sent him a resignation letter, but said simply that Defense Minister Alain Juppe will now become France’s top diplomat.

The president said former government minister Gerard Longuet, who heads Sarkozy’s conservative party in the Senate, will take up the defense portfolio.

Alliot-Marie’s office earlier said she has sent a letter to President Nicolas Sarkozy offering her resignation.

"While I do not feel that I have committed any wrongdoing, I have ... decided to leave my job as foreign minister," Alliot-Marie wrote in her resignation letter. "I ask you to accept my resignation," she wrote in the letter, which begins with a handwritten "Dear Nicolas."

"Since several weeks, I have been the target of political attacks and then in the media, using, to create suspicion, counter-truths and generalizations," wrote Alliot-Marie, who was named France's first woman foreign minister in December. "For the last two weeks, it is my family's private life that has been suffering real harassment at the hands of certain media (and) I cannot accept that some people use this cabal to try to make people believe in a weakening of France's international policy."

Michele Alliot-Marie has been at the center of a political storm over her December vacation in Tunisia as popular protests there eventually led to the ouster of the former French colony's longtime strongman.

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Pay hike for Saudis in private firms urged

Well said , I hope it would include everybody as we all need to cope with the rising cost of in

Basheer at Mar 1, 2011 01:38

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