Edouard Balladur related content 

France's finance minister has a domestic role in a global crisis. It is not in the least to François Baroin's discredit that, in the middle of the most severe...

The man tasked with fixing Europe's financial supervision. There are two true grey eminences in the economic-policy world today. These two old men, a year either side of 80...

The French civil servant behind the EU's response to the financial crisis. For an organisation notorious for chaotic economic policymaking and lacking a united voice on the...

As speechwriter to the president of France, Henri Guaino has used his lyrical power to increase his backstage influence. But can he last? Although French President Nicolas...

Nowadays it is considered one of the greatest successes of European integration, but the launch of the single currency was beset with uncertainty right up until its creation...

IF YOU thought newly elected Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin was the second most powerful man in France, think again. True, Raffarin heads a government that will be able...

NICOLAS Sarkozy is a man in a hurry. France's new interior minister is just 47 but he already has a political career that stretches back 25 years. To say he is ambitious is...

ONCE upon a time, thousands of bright young Frenchmen on the cusp of their twenties yearned not to be train drivers or footballers but dreamt of life as a top civil servant....

Dominique Voynet As Tammy Wynette was always fond of saying, sometimes it's hard to be a woman. The country and western star's heartfelt message is sure to have a particular...

A SHORTAGE of high-calibre candidates with economic or industrial experience and disputes over who should take charge of four new foreign policy dossiers have hampered Romano...

"IF DE Gaulle had been a Communist, if he had been Tito, I too would have been a Communist." Such was the degree of loyalty shown to his country's ageing president by...

The stark contrast between the battle waged behind closed doors at the euro summit and the very public display of unity when Kohl and Chirac met again a few days later came...

THE high-profile squabble over the presidency of the European Central Bank gets journalists and EU-groupies terribly excited. But the sad truth is that Bank of France...

With the European Central Bank due to come into being in March 1998, Tim Jones advises Wim Duisenberg (left) not to start measuring up the curtains for the president's office...

WILL the great dream of EMU create or destroy jobs? It is often said that a lot of different interpretations can be put on the same information. This has never beentruer than...

EDITH Cresson is known outside France primarily for being the country's first woman prime minister and for two off-the-cuff remarks. Cresson is no civil servant. But she...

IN the incestuous world of Parisian politics, Michel Barnier stands apart as a self-made man. The athletic 45-year-old minister for European affairs is one of the few...

NOW that it has restored diplomatic ties with Serbia and Montenegro, the coast is clear for the Union to begin mapping out strategies for the Balkan region as a whole. But...

GUY Legras is a small man, but he carries a very large wallet. As one American journalist so succinctly put it as the diminutive boss of the agriculture directorate-general...

“EUROPE became less Nordic and more Mediterranean today”, declared Italian Foreign Minister Susanna Agnelli at the end of this week's two-day conference in Barcelona,...