Martine Aubry: Mayor of Lille
and rising star of French left
By Andrew Stevens, Deputy Editor

19 April 2008: Though born a Parisian in 1950, Martine Aubry now serves as mayor of the northern French city of Lille. The daughter of former European Commission President Jacques Delors, she joined the Socialist Party (PS) the same year as her father. She was educated in economics at both of France's elite institutions for public servants, Sciences Po and the École nationale d'administration (ENA). Aubry's status as an énarque typifies the PS' longstanding association with the institution and the dynastic elements of her and her father's careers are intertwined with most of the party's history in government.

• Mayor Monitor for Martine Aubry: Assess her performance in office

After her stints at Sciences Po (graduated 1972) and ENA (1975-1978), she entered the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and taught at the ENA until 1981 when, following François Mitterrand's election as president, she was attached to ministers Jean Auroux and Pierre Bérégovoy, for whom she drafted legislation. Aubry's father Jacques Delors served as finance minister (1981-84) under the administration of Pierre Mauroy, until his appointment to the European Commission in 1985. In 1989 she joined the nationalised Pechiney aluminium company as Deputy Director-General.

Aubry entered government herself in the administration of Edith Cresson (briefly France's only female prime minister and then Delors' successor as French EU Commissioner) in 1991, serving as minister of labour, as well as under the government of Pierre Bérégovoy (which replaced Cresson's after the 1992 regional election defeat for the PS). She lost ministerial office with the downfall of the Bérégovoy administration in 1993 following its routing in the March parliamentary elections, the worst result since the party's formation.

In 1995, during the right's period of national office (1993-1997), Aubry secured election as first deputy mayor of Lille, serving under Pierre Mauroy, the city's mayor since 1973 (including while prime minister) who had acted as regional baron since the PS' foundation. One of the reasons attributed to Jacques Delors' decision not to seek the PS nomination for president that year following Mitterrand's retirement and his tenure as EC President (which eventually became a face off between Lionel Jospin for the Socialists and Paris mayor Jacques Chirac for the Gaullists) was that he did not wish to impair his daughter's own political career. Aubry's career in national politics was resuscitated however when the PS returned to government under prime minister Lionel Jospin's cohabitation government in 1997, becoming labour minister once more. It was during this period that she entered the national political lexicon, as the sponsor of the 'Aubry Law', more commonly known as the 35-hour working week, thus enacting a key demand of the 1981 Mitterrand socialist programme.

Her political legacy intact (or perhaps not so, cf. the reforms of the current Sarkozy presidency), she retired from the cabinet in 2001 and secured election as mayor of Lille in May of that year. In doing so, she replaced Mauroy, whose retirement was predicated upon his earlier elevation to the presidency of the intercommunal Urban Community of Lille Métropole (1989-2008). As party secretary (1988-1992) Mauroy mediated in the internecine conflict between rival camps, which played out during the latter years of Mitterrand’s presidency as his successor was sought, including the stunning 1993 defeat and the party's loss of the presidency two years later. Aubry herself received a surprise defeat in the 2002 parliamentary elections, held after the Socialists' first round exit in the presidential poll, for which an effectively leaderless party and an overcrowded left field (for instance, the maverick candidature of former PS minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement) were blamed. The UMP's candidate and her successor in the National Assembly seat, Sebastian Huyghe, then challenged Aubry as Lille mayor. She was comfortably re-elected as mayor in March 2008 however.

After having been vice president of the Urban Community of Lille Metropole since 1995, Aubry was elected president of the metro region in April 2008. The Urban Community was founded in 1967 and consists of 85 communes, including that from which its name derives. In addition to its representative and economic development functions, it administers Transpole, the public transport operator of the local bus, tram and metro systems. The Lille Urban Community is one of 14 in France (the second largest, after Lyon), which are the strongest and most powerful form of intercommunal arrangements available to French urban areas. Originally limited to just four (Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon and Strasbourg), their number and powers were expanded by a law introduced by interior minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement in 1999 following earlier attempts to merge the numerous communes.

Martine Aubry is divorced from her former husband, Xavier, whose surname she carries. Aubry has published a steady stream of books on human resources, local government and current affairs, since her time as a ministerial adviser to the present day, and has been the subject of three biographies. She also serves on the executive of the Socialist Party at national level. She is a member of the Century Club, which seeks to bring together France's elite and most influential politicians, businessmen and writers.