Rachida Dati, France‘s culture minister, is stepping down from her post to run for mayor of Paris in next month’s election, she told the Financial Times in an interview Wednesday.
Dati was appointed minister of culture by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal in 2024 as part of President Emmanuel Macron’s new-look centrist cabinet, following an election that saw Macron pivot to the right. Le Monde‘s read of her term at culture minister was scathing, writing that it “resembled more a series of publicity stunts. than genuine achievements,” and that she “neglected live entertainment, failed on the reform of public broadcasting and stumbled on the Louvre issue.”
A controversial figure in France, Dati is a member of Les Républicains, a center-right party founded by former president Nicolas Sarkozy, under whom she served as spokesperson and minister of justice. Dati then served as a member of the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019.
In 2020, she ran for mayor of Paris against incumbent Anne Hidalgo, the city’s first woman mayor since 2014 and a member of the Socialist party. This time, Dati will not be running against Hidalgo, who announced last year she would not seek reelection; the frontrunner is Emmanuel Grégoire, another member of the Socialist party with broad support on the left. Recent polling shows Dati tightly trailing Grégoire in the first round, with Dati pulling ahead in a second round two-way run off.
In her interview with the FT, Dati painted her candidacy as an effort to “smash the glass ceiling,” referring not to her status as a woman, but as a minority. Dati’s parents are Moroccan and Algerian, and she was the first Muslin woman to hold a major goverment post in France. As the newspaper notes, though Dati is a member of Les Républicains, she has mostly repudiated that party’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Still, Dati has slammed the Socialists’ record. “Paris is overindebted, very dirty and crime has exploded . . . with public space becoming quite chaotic,” she told the FT, blaming their policies for Paris’s population contracting by 8 percent since 2012.
The Paris Mayoral Election will take place on March 15, with a run-off to follow on March 22, if not candidate secures an absolute majority.
Dati has one other hurdle to her candidacy, an ongoing criminal trial set for September in which she is accused of corruption during her term in the European parliament. She is alleged to have recieved over $1 million from automaker Renault; she claims it was for legal consultancy, but her accusers say it was for lobbying, illegal under EU rules.
As for Dati’s successor at the Ministry of Culture, Deadline‘s senior international film correspondent Melanie Goodfellow reports that the leading candidate is Catherine Pégard, Macron’s cultural adviser, who has also led the Palace of Versailles and served as chief of cultural development at the French Agency for AlUla Development, which has assisted Saudi Arabia in the development of that region and which has also suffered some controversy.
