WITH her fashion model looks and fervent belief in reform, Rama Yade is emblematic of President Nicolas Sarkozy's new leadership style. But the youngest and only black member of his "rainbow cabinet" says she is "more than a mere symbol".
Yade's status as a rising star of "Sarkoland" was confirmed last Monday when she joined a select group of the president's friends and family at a surprise 53rd birthday party thrown for him by Carla Bruni, his Italian girlfriend - whom he married yesterday - at her flat.
"The president is like my father," said Yade, 31, the secretary of state for human rights, in an interview with The Sunday Times.
"He's very loyal, like a mentor to me. He was telling them all [at the party], 'I want to protect her. If I weren't here to protect her, she would be destroyed'."
In a government that includes ethnic minorities, women and Socialists, Yade, who was born in Senegal, has the advantage of being all three - making her the embodiment of change under Sarkozy, who has pledged to shake up France through economic and social reforms.
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"I think we've passed an important landmark with Sarkozy," said Yade, whose youth and inexperience distinguish her as much as her daring outfits - a short black skirt and matching top for her interview - in the stuffy, male-dominated Ministry of Foreign Affairs where she works in a gargantuan office.
"I don't think it's just a political strategy," she added, referring to suggestions that the "hyper-president" had recruited leading Socialist figures, such as Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister, and representatives of ethnic minorities such as herself to win support in the immigrant banlieues and to neutralise any threat from the left.
"He wasn't obliged to do it," she said. "He had won [the presidential election] already."
She offered an intriguing insight into the psychology of a head of state famous for his enjoyment of "le bling bling" - the jewels and jets of billionaire friends with which he wooed the high-maintenance Bruni, a model and folk singer.
His desire to make official France more representative of its minorities, said Yade, was "completely sincere" and was rooted in his background as a Hungarian immigrant's son who understood better than most politicians the frustration of exclusion.
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"He has always thought like someone from a minority," Yade said of the president. "He's always thought that people did not want him, that he was somehow illegitimate. So that's why he understands minorities so well: he thinks of himself as not completely French. He has a particular sensitivity about that."
On the wall behind Yade was the official portrait of "Sarko" and two flagpoles stood on either side of her desk, on which she was burning a joss-stick. She is astonished at how far she has come.
"I am very proud when I'm abroad, representing France," she said, "when they turn to me and say: what is the position of France? And France is me. It is an amazing feeling.
"To represent not the blacks, not minorities, but the French, that's extraordinary."
She was catapulted into the spotlight in December for attacking a state visit to Paris by Colonel Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, whom she accused of using France like a "doormat" for "wiping off the blood of his victims".
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Some thought Sarkozy might sack her for breaking ranks with the government but instead the president's reprimand "was more affectionate than political", she said, recalling the day she was summoned to the Elysée Palace: "He said that he was hurt because he thought I didn't have confidence in him to stand up for human rights."
Sarkozy later issued a statement of support for Yade. The public had widely approved of her intervention, regarding Gadaffi's sojourn in Paris as a blatant example of a president pandering to a dictator, despite Sarkozy's promises to break with the bad old ways of the past.
Even so, Yade defended Sarkozy last week against accusations that he was putting business interests ahead of human rights in countries such as Libya, China and Russia.
It would be "naive and dangerous", she said, to base foreign policy exclusively on "values", because France could not influence the world without economic power. "You have to be strong to give lessons to the world," she said.
She joked at the surprise of friends on the left when she accepted a job in the government of a politician whom many Socialists regard as a dangerous rightwinger.
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"They wonder what I'm doing here," she said. "Nicolas Sarkozy is not a conservative, though. Nowadays it is the left that is conservative. In any case, I'm not interested in labels. It is what you do that's important, not what you say."
The daughter of a diplomat and a history teacher, Yade was 15 when she first became aware of Sarkozy. She watched on television when, as mayor of the Parisian suburb of Neuilly, he walked into a classroom to negotiate with a "human bomb" who was holding a group of infants hostage.
"I thought he was very courageous," she said. "Not every politician would do that."
Cécilia, the former wife of Sarkozy who divorced him four months ago, has accused the president of surrounding himself with "pretty faces" since her departure, referring to the prominence of figures such as Rachida Dati, the justice minister, and Yade. The latter laughs it off as "not serious".
She hopes to repay the president's trust in her, saying: "I do not want to disappoint. I don't want them to say, 'She was too young, she was too this, she was too that'."