Pierre Lellouche

Other activities

• European Leadership Network (ELN), Member^[7]
• French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), co-founder and Member of the Board of Directors^[14]
• Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), Member
• Trilateral Commission, Member
• Terra Firma, Advisory Board member
• The International Institute for Strategic Studies, Member of the Board

Early beginnings

In 1986, he became a part of the consulting team for Jacques Chirac. He then served as Chirac's diplomatic adviser from 1989 to 1996 during which time Chirac held various positions: Mayor of Paris, President of the RPR party, and, from 1995 onwards, President of the French Republic.

Lellouche was a member of the National Assembly of France, first for Val d'Oise's 8th constituency (1993-1997) and later for Paris' 4th constituency (1997-2009). In parliament, Pierre Lellouche served on the Defense Committee (1993-1994 and 1997–2002) and the Committee on Foreign Affairs (1995-1997 and 2002–2007).^[15] In addition to his committee assignments, he was a member of the French delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly from 1997 until 2009; he served as the Assembly's president from November 2004 to November 2006.

From 2002, Lellouche was also a member of "The Reformers" within the UMP group, which advocated deep reform of the administration and liberalization of the economy.

In 2002, Pierre Lellouche authored a bill to increase penalties for racist and anti-Semitic offenses. This proposal was unanimously adopted by the National Assembly on 10 December 2002, and became known as the "Lellouche Law".^[16]

2002-09 - Negotiator, mandated by Jacques Chirac, for France on the ITER experimental reactor (thermonuclear fusion) at Cadarache, against the competing Japanese location at Fukushima.^[17]

After the 2007 French legislative elections, Pierre Lellouche received backing from his political allies, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Fillon, for the role of chair of either the National Assembly's Committee on Foreign Affairs or the Defence Committee. However, Edouard Balladur, who had been defeated by Chirac in 1995, secured the position as a form of "compensation."

On the local level, Lellouche was also a municipal councillor of Cannes (1995-2001) and a councillor of Paris (since 2001; reelected in 2008).

In 2008, Pierre Lellouche was appointed by French President Sarkozy as special advisor on Franco-Turkish affairs during a period of heightened diplomatic tensions between the two countries. In 2009, he was appointed as special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.^[18] In this role, he collaborated closely with Richard Holbrooke of the United States, Bernd Mützelburg of Germany, and Sherard Cowper-Coles of the United Kingdom.^[19]

Governmental functions

• Secretary of State for Foreign Trade: 2010-2012
• Secretary of State for European Affairs: 2009-2010

As State Secretary for European Affairs, Lellouche was involved in the negotiations on the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) in 2010.^[20] In response to the 2010 Russian wildfires, he told Le Figaro that the EU should pool assets to create a European emergency force and build mutual assistance capabilities to deal with emergencies.^[21]

Later career

Upon returning to parliament, Pierre Lellouche served on the Committee on Foreign Affairs again from 2012 until 2017.^[15] In this capacity, he joined a delegation led by François Fillon, on an official trip to Iraq in September 2014.^[22]

In 2016, Lellouche's call for the impeachment of President Hollande for allegedly disclosing classified information to journalists,^[23] was dismissed by a cross-party steering committee.^[24]

Ahead of the Republicans' 2016 presidential primary, Lellouche endorsed François Fillon as the party's candidate for the 2017 French presidential election. Amid the Fillon affair, he resigned from the campaign team.^[25] In an open letter, he also announced his plans to leave politics.^[26][1]

European integration

Pierre Lellouche called the UK Conservative Party's policy on the EU "pathetic" and a kind of political autism,^[27] claiming "They have essentially castrated your UK influence in the European parliament."^[28]

Foreign policy

Pierre Lellouche is considered to be a supporter of strong cooperation with the United States of America.^[29]

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, he explained Crimea would stay Russian because no one will go to war for Ukraine^[30] and asked in 2023 if it is not time to wonder about a way out of this war ?.^[31]

Domestic policy

In October 1999, Pierre Lellouche defended a traditional view of the family during the discussions concerning the Pacte civil de solidarité (PACS), a contractual form of civil union. Several observers pointed out some of his "homophobic" arguments.^[32][33] However, later on in 2003 he was in favor of a law introducing harsher punishments for abuses against homosexuals.

He was also a strong opponent of the solidarity tax on wealth (ISF) first voted under François Mitterrand.

In 2015, Lellouche opposed a parliamentary decision to create a $60-million fund to compensate Holocaust victims deported by French state rail firm SNCF to Nazi concentration camps in a move also intended to protect the company from future U.S. litigation.^[34]

In response to the January 2015 Île-de-France attacks, Pierre Lellouche publicly opposed a bill proposed by Prime Minister Manuel Valls to let France's intelligence services deploy fly-on-the-wall spying devices more easily against suspected terrorists.^[35]

Israel

In 2003, he declared in the French newspaper Libération, "a new antisemitism, is linked to the crisis in the Middle East, which appeared about twenty years ago".^[36] In 2014, it is opposed to the socialist resolution on the recognition of a Palestinian state, but protested "against the unbearable and unacceptable interference of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the vote of the French Parliament".^[37] In 2015, he discovers having been monitored by the NSA.^[38] In 2017, he reaffirms his position on “the necessary halt to the construction of new settlements”, but declares himself against a “strategy of one-upmanship against Israel”.^[39]