French politics. De Villepin, le marocain

A prime minister's North African roots dovetail with France's keenest concerns

IT TURNED out to be a symbolic visit, in more ways than one. For his first scheduled trip outside Europe as France's prime minister, Dominique de Villepin chose to fly this week to Morocco - the land of his birth, and a favourite backyard of President Jacques Chirac. Designed at least in part to discuss counter-terrorism, the trip took place as nine North Africans were arrested in France, suspected of planning attacks on the Paris transport system and on an intelligence-agency headquarters.

To the delight of his hosts in Rabat, the Moroccan capital, Mr de Villepin talked publicly of returning to his roots in “this land that I love”. In private, he described how, growing up abroad in Rabat and then Venezuela, his relationship with France was marked by a feeling of “absence and lack”, and was hence perhaps more passionate than that of other Frenchmen. His conception of France, and of its role in the world, is steeped in the imagined ideal he had of the country before he knew it.

His unapologetic talk about national destiny and national pride may sound comical to non-French ears, but in some ways it responds to the country's morose mood. “There's a search for someone who can represent France well and restore its self-esteem,” argues Dominique Reynie, a political scientist at Sciences-Po in Paris. Though the French want concrete results, particularly jobs, and find his more florid oratory a turn-off, Mr de Villepin's popularity has grown in pace with his increasingly presidential manner, especially when representing France abroad.

This was on display in Morocco, only days after the prime minister, an undeclared presidential hopeful, had stood in for a convalescing President Chirac at the UN summit of world leaders in New York. Officially, the Moroccan visit was just a regular bilateral meeting and Mr de Villepin, who served as Mr Chirac's chief of staff for many years, is careful not to appear to upstage his mentor. But, as he stepped out of his plane to review the royal guard in their snow-white uniforms and later flew off to Oujda for a special audience with King Mohammed VI, he looked like someone who had been practising for the job all his life.

Behind the discussion of social and economic development, which officially dominated the Moroccan talks, is a belief that raising standards of living is also a way to combat Islamic extremism, alongside shorter-term security measures. “We can't be too explicit publicly about counter-terrorism,” says one French official, “in order not to offend our hosts.”

The need to tighten counter-terrorist policy was underlined by this week's arrests in France. One of those detained, Safe Bourada, had been released from prison in 2003 after already serving a sentence for terrorism. His group is said to be linked to the Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat (GSPC), an Algerian network whose contacts with al-Qaeda have worried French intelligence officials for some time. Although there was no direct Moroccan link to the arrests, there is a broader concern about the connection between North African terror cells and al-Qaeda. Many of the suspects arrested in the wake of the Madrid bombing are Moroccan. The Moroccan city of Casablanca was itself a recent terror target.

In an apparent attempt to upstage Mr de Villepin, his chief rival on the right for the presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister, took advantage of the prime minister's absence in Morocco to expound his own views on terrorism. In a two-hour television programme, he confirmed his plan to unveil shortly a new counter-terrorism bill, describing the terror threat to France as “very high”. The French are keenly aware that their opposition to the war in Iraq guarantees them no protection. Their support for the anti-Islamist Algerian government, not to mention the headscarf ban in state schools or their collaboration with America in Afghanistan, provides sufficient pretext for an attack. In a recent GSPC communique, currently in French intelligence hands and leaked by Le Figaro, the group declared that, “France is our number one enemy” and “the only way to discipline France is jihad and martyrdom for Islam”.