Rachida Dati

Rachida Dati is fed up with serving as a Euro-MP, a job she has held for less than six months out of a five-year term.

Speaking candidly when she forgot that microphones were recording, Dati said, “I can’t take it any more; I can’t take it any more. I have to stay here and act clever, because there’s some press here and there’s [European Commission president] Barroso’s election. When you’re in Strasbourg, they see if you vote or not; if you don’t, that means you weren’t there.”

Dati enjoys celebrity in French conservative circles. She makes much of her other-side-of-the-tracks background as one of twelve children born into a modest Moroccan-Algerian couple in provincial France; today, she’s partial to Dior. A close advisor to Sarkozy during his presidential bid, Dati served as justice minister, winning a reputation as a difficult person. Her main accomplishment at the justice ministry probably was an administrative reorganization of the French court system; other initiatives generated attention but little action. Dati, who had never run for any elective office, won contests in 2009 as Euro MP and as mayor of Paris’s posh seventh arrondissement. Oddly, Dati seems both to crave attention and to court mystery. The greatest mysteries in her life today are the identity of the man who fathered the child she bore in 2008, and whether he has a place in the mother and daughter’s lives today.

Part of Dati’s remarks suggests a preoccupation with money: Euro MPs receive base pay of €7661 per month, plus €298 per day of actual presence, plus a basket of perks.

Dati’s remarks certainly show frustration. For green party leader Daniel Cohn Bendit, this was inevitable: “She’s had enough. You could see it coming. I told you that she couldn’t stand it, that she’d come home.”

There’s nothing especially burdensome in serving as a Euro MP. Deputies aren’t made to suffer financially. The workload is not oppressive. Many political figures have made a second (or third or fourth) career as a Euro MP; it’s an excellent destination for skilled parliamentarians who suffer defeat at the polls when national political tides change.

Dati’s case is hardly isolated and shows the limits of the European political project. The European Parliament counts 736 (!) members and generates enormous operating costs. Its responsibilities have grown over the years, most recently through the Lisbon Treaty. But when the European Parliament is treated as an annex of national politics, the opportunities presented are wasted.