Anne-Marie Idrac has been recruited as Secrétaire d’État from her previous job running the French railways. The aim is to imitate the world leaders, Germany, by getting more small and medium-sized companies to export. An important new incentive for them is the tax credit for investment in research. The new Secretary of State for overseas trade has the no-nonsense air of a respected headmistress which belies her outstanding career. She is someone most people have never heard of but ought to have. She came quietly into the government on March 22, just a month after telling an interviewer that she was not interested in going back into politics. To have changed her mind is a bonus for Nicolas Sarkozy, who needs all the talent he can get, as well as a boost for Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, to whom she reports.
An Énarque, she has had a Rolls Royce career in the French transport industry, interspersed with politics in the centre. A member of the UDF, she was appointed a junior minister for Transport under Juppé and Chirac in 1995 and was one of the minority of ‘Juppettes’ to survive more than a few months. Before the government lost the 1997 election, she successfully pushed through the amalgamation of Air France and Air Inter. She was then elected as a UDF député for Yvelines from 1997 to 2002 when she was recruited by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin to head up the RATP, the public transport system for the whole of the Île de France. In her four years there she achieved a contractual guaranteed service during strikes, automated the Ligne 1 of the métro, launched the project for a circular métro line linking the suburbs round Paris – the métrophérique – and successfully took the RATP into overseas contracting in Casablanca, Florence and Johannesburg.
In 2006, she was appointed to the head of the SNCF where, building on the work of her predecessor Louis Gallois, she astonished everyone by reporting a small profit for the first time. She reformed the accounting system, restructured the pension fund, successfully launched the TGV Est, (with links to the German rail system reaching as far as Frankfurt and Munich), boosted the railway freight network and presided over the breaking of the world rail speed record. It is reported that when she resigned to join the government, the executives of the French railways gave her a 15-minute standing ovation.