Chirac keeps PM after poll rout

FRENCH President Jacques Chirac asked his unpopular Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin to stay on despite the regional poll disaster for the centre right, but ordered him to form a new government.

“Prime Minister Jean- Pierre Raffarin has handed the government’s resignation to the president ... who accepted it. He named Jean-Pierre Raffarin prime minister and ordered him to form a new government,” Mr Chirac’s office said.

The Elysée said the new line-up would be announced today, and the new cabinet would hold its first meeting on Friday.

Mr Chirac, who was due in Moscow tomorrow for talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has postponed his trip until Saturday to oversee the reshuffle.

A smiling Mr Raffarin refused to comment when he left Mr Chirac’s official residence, where they held more than an hour of talks before the announcement.

An aide said Mr Raffarin was “going to consult a lot” with his aides and meet again with Mr Chirac “in the next few hours”.

Mr Chirac’s governing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) was defeated in elections on Sunday, which resulted in the left-wing opposition led by the Socialists (PS) seizing control of 24 of 26 regional assemblies.

Former Socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius said Mr Chirac’s decision to keep Mr Raffarin showed the president “remains deaf to the clear message the French people sent to him on March 21 and 28”. The two-round regional polls were seen as a crucial mid-term test for Mr Raffarin’s two-year-old government, whose mandate runs out in 2007, and the centre right’s defeat threw its public sector reform into question.

Commentators have speculated Mr Raffarin will stay on through European elections in June to absorb public ire over plans to overhaul the social security system, employment law and state energy concerns. Junior transport minister Dominique Bussereau said the new government would be made up of a “political team of men and women with real experience in political life”. Mr Fabius said Mr Chirac’s next move “is already known: it will be, undoubtedly with great skill in the presentation, to renew the unjust and ineffective policies, lacking in foresight, that have been carried out for two years”.