Simone Veil, 2008. Wikicommons/Marie-Lan Nguyen. Some rights reserved.In an age of political vacuousness, we often ask what has happened to the quality of our leaders. Many believe that we deserve such poor leaders because we live in trivial, reality television-addled times dominated by consumerism. Electors across Europe seem, more often than not, unhappy with the leaders of their respective political parties.
The French however were never unhappy with Simone Veil, who has died at the age of 89. She was a – reluctant – politician of stature whose appeal transcended age, class and region. She was respected and held in immense affection ever since, as minister of health of President Valery Giscard d’Estaing in 1974 she won the bitter battle to make abortion legal, at a time when most French male politicians, especially if they were conservative Catholics, wanted women as tokens in ministerial office – government was a man’s business.
Simone Veil survived Auschwitz and though never a campaigner for Jewish causes knew that being Jewish was central to her life. She did not take kindly to the brutal killing fields of the Balkans in the 1990s or Gaza being called genocide. She had witnessed the Holocaust and knew the difference. She refused to accept General de Gaulle’s decision to cover up French complicity in the Holocaust and objected to his disdainful rhetoric after Israel's victory in the Six Day War in 1967, to the effect that Jews were an eternally “domineering” people, a rhetoric that owed rather more than it acknowledged to the 1930s right. She was bitter that it took the French state till 1995 to acknowledge that it was the French government, not simply a perverse band of Petainists that organised the deportation of Jews from France till 1944.
