MONTREAL―She started as a journalist and became a stand-in for the Queen. Now former governor general Michaëlle Jean is packing boxes for her latest move up the diplomatic ladder into lavish digs as the chosen representative of the world's French-speaking nations.
The jet-set life and sumptuous five-story Parisian offices a stroll from the Eiffel Tower that she will command as secretary general of La Francophonie may be a throwback to her vice-regal digs at Rideau Hall, the GG's Ottawa residence. But behind the glamour and photo ops, Jean, 57, is stepping into an imposing position that will have her tackling wars, disease and desperate poverty when she officially takes the post in January.
It's a role that has so far been filled by political and diplomatic giants. When Boutros Boutros-Ghali was named secretary general in 1998, he had already run the United Nations for two terms, served as foreign minister of Egypt and helped broker a peace deal between his country and Israel in 1979. His successor, whom Jean is replacing, was Abdou Diouf, a towering sage of a man whose previous post had been as Senegal's president. Many feel he will be impossible to replace.
Both were also men from the African continent, whose countries make up a majority of the Francophonie membership. Born in Haiti, raised in Quebec, educated in Europe and having served as the symbol of British legacy in Canada, Jean is many things. But she does not hail from Africa, and that is just one reason for the bristling in some corners of an organization that has traditionally been bankrolled by the rich northern countries (including $38 million in 2013-14 from Canada, the second largest donor after France) and fronted by the poorer south.
The succession blueprint built around Burkina Faso president Blaise Compaoré was scrapped in October when he was run out of his country after trying to change his country's constitution and extend his mandate past 2015.
African countries couldn't rally around any of Jean's four other opponents ― all Africans ― and that allowed Prime Minister Stephen Harper to push Canada's candidate to victory in the final hours of last week's Francophonie summit in Dakar.
Guinea's president, Alpha Condé, was one of the few to speak frankly about the decision, saying it was "embarrassing" the African leaders couldn't come together, but that he had his hopes about Jean.
"She could be Canadian and end up doing much more for Africa," he said.
Doubts persist. In reports citing anonymous malcontents, there were complaints that Jean would use her new post only as a trampoline for the next role, given her rapid rise from journalist to head of state to UNICEF ambassador and University of Ottawa chancellor. When she deigned to answer a question in English at her post-election news conference, a French politician grumbled about his fears of a "North American Francophonie for the next four years."
Yet others see Jean, who declined the Star's interview requests, as just the person to lead a group hoping to break out of its traditional anglophobic fallback positions, build on its ambitions of being what French President François Hollande called "a mini-United Nations" and venture into a new sphere, that of an economic bloc.
Abdou Diouf definitely saw something there when he cited "the quality of your relations with British authorities" in asking Jean to serve as the Francophonie's language hawk for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
The report she submitted touted her success in tough negotiations and the ability to rally people to her cause. She wrote of badgering the International Olympic Committee and the cost-conscious organizers of the 2012 London Olympics to ensure French appeared in signs, speeches and sporting programs but noted (or boasted) that the "francophile" Queen Elizabeth II was no obstacle.
"Our discussions always took place in French, cordial and warm," Jean wrote.
As secretary general of the Francophonie, Jean will have to do the bidding of its 80 members and observer states, which is no easy task when those nations are as varied as Vietnam, Costa Rica and Switzerland. But she is also lord and master of a hundreds-strong diplomatic corps.
She is its ultimate head of human resources and its chief spokesperson. The organization even has its own administrative justice system and appeal court for errant staffers. Jean also heads a cultural and educational network that includes TV5, the international French-language broadcaster, and a network of dozens of university professors who carry out funded research on issues dear to the Francophonie.
"She will have to return to a 90-hour work week," says Jean-Louis Roy, a Montreal-based researcher and former journalist who served from 1990 to 1998 as secretary general in the Agence Intergouvernementale de la Francophonie, a precursor to today's organization. "She will also, of course, have to travel.
"More than that, she will have to bring together and keep together the best elements of all those countries, those who want to adjust to the changing world in which we live. She will have to meet a lot of people and discuss with them and propose things to them. It's not an ordinary job."
On top of the revolving door of diplomats and politicians at the Francophonie's Paris headquarters on the left bank of the Seine, Abdou Diouf hit four of the five continents over the past year, met the Pope in Rome, weighed in on the civil war in the Central African Republic and plotted co-operation with the head of the Commonwealth in London, among other official duties.
Jean will have a similar schedule. She'll have drivers and assistants, but will also be guided in her activities by a budget scare several years ago that exposed shoddy bookkeeping, spiralling costs and a Francophonie on the edge of financial ruin. Now equipped with an annual budget of more than $100 million ― one that member states are being asked to increase ― she is tasked with handling the Francophonie's transformation from language vanguard and political player to agent of economic growth.
That will be a challenge given that development in former French colonies has tended to lag behind that of English-speaking African nations, notes Philippe Hugon, director of the Paris-based think tank Institute de Relations Internationales et Strategiques in
an analysis of the challenges Jean faces.
Her campaign stressed her intention to work on reducing the chasm between the Francophonie's rich and poor countries without getting tied down by too many details. But Jean will also be expected to pitch her own ideas about how to reach the goals set out for the organization, says Roy.
"She's not just a servant."
Canada reportedly bankrolled her winning campaign and now it's sending her off into the world. But it's not entirely altruistic, Roy notes. Success abroad will inevitably buff the Harper government's sometimes tarnished foreign policy reputation, particularly in Africa and the Arab world.
"She will have to be quite present in the francophone countries but she will also be at the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations)," Roy says. "She's does not report to the Canadian government, but . . . all her interlocutors in the world will know that she is Canadian."
