French foreign minister Laurent Fabius is the country’s longest-serving socialist politician in government, having previously headed four ministries and becoming, in 1984, France’s youngest ever prime minister at the age of 37. Elected president of the National Assembly, the lower house, on two occasions, he has served as head of the Socialist Party and remains one of its leading officials in a career that spans 40 years. During that period, he has built up a powerful political base in the Seine-Maritime département (county) in northern France, where he has also held numerous local posts, as a Member of Parliament, mayor and councillor. In the run-up to this weekend’s Socialist Party congress in Poitiers, Stéphane Alliès and Mathilde Mathieu have investigated the workings of Fabius’s fiefdom, interviewing local party officials past and present, and uncovered disturbing evidence of a lucrative ‘jobs for the boys’ system of rewards for loyalty. Here they report on how Didier Marie, one of the foreign minister’s faithful local circle of allies, was able to earn 12,000 euros per month over several years from a catalogue of jobs that would, to all appearances, test even the most ardent workaholic.
