By STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: February 3, 2011
Eric Feferberg/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Michèle Alliot-Marie after the cabinet meeting on Wednesday. She said she would not resign “over false claims.”
Ms. Alliot-Marie and her partner, Patrick Ollier, a government minister in charge of relations with Parliament, vacationed in Tunisia between Christmas and New Year’s, when small antigovernment demonstrations were under way and some protesters had died.
Even worse, her opponents say, she and Mr. Ollier took a flight on a private jet owned by Aziz Miled, a Tunisian businessman who is in a partnership with the family of the country’s former president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who was forced from office by the protests. The flight was reported by the French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné.
Mr. Miled, as an associate of Mr. Ben Ali’s brother-in-law Belhassen Trabelsi, is on a list of people subject to an assets freeze by Swiss authorities.
Ms. Alliot-Marie, 64, angrily rejected calls from the Socialist opposition for her resignation and said that Mr. Miled, who made a fortune in tourism, was a friend who offered space on his jet for a trip he would have taken in any event. She said that Mr. Miled was not a close associate of the Ben Ali family, and that his charter airline business had been “plundered” by Mr. Trabelsi, who insisted on taking a share of it.
“On my arrival in Tunis, a friend who was going to Tabarka with his plane offered to take us with him rather than spend two hours in a car as planned,” she said, referring to Mr. Miled. “He did not lend us his plane; we accompanied him on his journey.”
The Socialist leader in Parliament, Jean-Marc Ayrault, called on Ms. Alliot-Marie to resign. “She no longer has any place in government,” he said. Others raised questions about her judgment and about whether a French foreign minister should accept free flights from anyone.
The head of the Socialist Party, Martine Aubry, said that “when one is in government, one shouldn’t use private means.” A legislator, Pierre Moscovici, said, “She was there when a revolution was taking place and saw nothing.” He insisted that Ms. Alliot-Marie “can no longer speak for France; she must go.”
On Thursday, Prime Minister François Fillon and President Nicolas Sarkozy both supported Ms. Alliot-Marie, who has served as the minister of defense, interior and justice. Mr. Fillon said she had their “full confidence,” and complained that calls for her resignation were a “purely political polemic.”
A government spokesman, François Baroin, said she had “explained and even made a ‘mea culpa,’ ” and he called the affair “closed.”
But even some members of the governing party suggested that Tunisia was a poor choice for a vacation at Christmas. Nadine Morano, a junior minister, said it seemed to be “a political blunder.”
Mr. Sarkozy had promised a government “beyond reproach,” and last year fired ministers who had taken advantage of their office by charging cigars to the state and letting relatives use state-provided apartments.
It has been a bad beginning for Ms. Alliot-Marie, who was appointed as foreign minister in November. Just a few days before Mr. Ben Ali fled Tunisia on Jan. 14, she told French legislators that the French police could provide better training to their Tunisian counterparts to help restore calm because the French were skilled in “security situations of this type.”
It was later reported that France had approved the export of police equipment and crowd-control devices to Tunisia at the height of the demonstrations, and that the French ambassador in Tunis was slow to grasp that the government was about to fall.
Ms. Alliot-Marie said that it had been her intention to spare life through better police tactics. She said that “the abiding principles of our international policy are noninterference, support for democracy and freedom and the application of the rule of law.”
As a former colonial power, she said, France is “more obliged to a certain reserve — we don’t want to pour oil on a fire, but to help as far as possible a friendly people, but without interfering.” Mr. Sarkozy later said that France had severely underestimated the Tunisians’ anger, and he replaced the French ambassador.
As for her Christmas holiday, Ms. Alliot-Marie told reporters there were was no question of her resigning “over false claims, mere assertions.” She added, “I only reply about these things because I don’t like people telling lies about me.” She then went on a series of television and radio programs to defend herself.
On Friday, she has scheduled a working lunch in Paris with the new Tunisian foreign minister, Ahmed Ounaïes.
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