PARIS: Former French culture minister Audrey Azoulay was selected to head the embattled UN cultural agency Unesco after defeating her Qatari rival by only two votes in a cliff-hanger on Friday.

Azoulay, 49, came from behind after six rounds of voting to defeat Hamad bin Abdulaziz Al-Kawari, also an ex-culture minister, by 30 votes to 28 after he failed to pick up support from other Gulf states that are part of a Saudi-led coalition blockading Qatar.

When Azoulay, then number two at France’s National Cinema Centre, was named the country’s culture minister last year, she barely had a public profile — she didn’t even have a Twitter account.

Edges out Qatari candidate by only two votes

That was quickly rectified as the career civil servant, long used to working behind the scenes in the higher spheres of French administrations, got her first exposure to the bright lights of politics.

Azoulay declared her last-minute candidacy to lead Unesco in March, saying that “France was perfectly legitimate on the subject of culture, education and sciences”. But she was not able to campaign fully until leaving her post after President Emmanuel Macron named a new government following his election in May. During her tenure of just over a year as culture minister under leftist president Francois Hollande, Azoulay secured a budget increase for her ministry after years of deep cuts.

Her tenure was also marked by the passage of a “creation and heritage” law aimed at ensuring artistic freedom and protecting France’s myriad historic sites, the culmination of years of efforts.

Azoulay was born in Paris on August 4, 1972, into a Moroccan Jewish family. Her father is Andre Azoulay, a banker and adviser to the Morocco’s King Mohammed VI — as he was to the king’s father, Hassan II — and her mother is the writer Katia Brami.

She studied at Sciences-Po university in Paris and at the Lancaster University in Britain before graduating from France’s ENA, an elite school that grooms France’s future leaders.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2017