A member of The Republicans, he was Prime Minister of France from 1995 to 1997 under President Jacques Chirac, during which period he faced major strikes that paralysed the country and became very unpopular.

After the ghost jobs affair in December 2004, Juppé suspended his political career until he was re-elected as mayor of Bordeaux in October 2006.

He served briefly as Minister of State for Ecology and Sustainable Development in 2007, but resigned in June 2007 after failing in his bid to be re-elected in the 2007 legislative election.

At the beginning of 2019, he accepted a nomination to become a member of the French Constitutional Council and subsequently announced that he would be resigning as mayor of Bordeaux.

His father was Robert Juppé (1915-1998), a Gaullist resistance fighter at the end of World War II, who came from a family of railwaymen and later became a farmer, and his mother was Marie Darroze (1910-2004), the devoted Catholic daughter of a judge.

He then came to Paris for a literary preparatory classe at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and entered the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in 1964 to get a Classics agrégation in 1967.

Alain Juppé's profession, outside politics, is Inspector of Finances, a position from which he was on leave to hold his various elected and appointed offices.

With Michel Aurillac, he led the club 89, officially a think tank, indeed a sort of counter-government to prepare the 1986 legislative elections.

His role was to maintain Chirac's leadership on the party against the rise of the younger generation of "renovators" and of sovereignist Gaullists such as Philippe Séguin and Charles Pasqua.

Pasqua humorously wrote in his Memoirs : "The RPR was now ruled like the North-Korean Communist Party... without the enlightened leadership of Kim Il Sung".

Some controversies have emerged later on this subject (in August 2008, he was named in a Rwandan government report on the alleged French connection in the Rwanda genocide during his tenure as Foreign Minister[3]).

In January 1996, Alain Juppé, together with interior minister Jean-Louis Debré, opened negotiations with the FLNC-Canal Historique, then the largest guerrilla group in the Corsican conflict.

The ensuing Tralonca peace campaign became Juppé’s priority in government, holding numerous meetings and conferences and even traveling to Corsica.

He appealed the decision, whereupon his disqualification from holding elected office was reduced to one year and the suspended sentence cut to 14 months.

The court commented: It is regrettable that at the time when the legislative body became aware of the need to end criminal practices which existed for the financing of political parties, Mr Juppé did not apply to his own party the very rules that he had voted for in Parliament.It is equally regrettable that Mr Juppé, whose intellectual qualities are unanimously recognized, did not judge appropriate to assume before Justice his entire criminal responsibility and kept on denying established facts.However, Mr Juppé has given himself for many years to the service of the State, while he did obtain no personal enrichment from these crimes he committed for the benefit of his political party, for which he should not be a scapegoat.

[12] Juppé considered giving classes on public administration at a variety of prominent United States and Quebec universities and colleges, including the UQÀM in Montreal, some of which were initially receptive to having a former prime minister be a member of their faculty.

[13] Juppé was finally taken in by the École nationale d'administration publique in Montreal where he served as a full-time faculty member for the academic year 2005–2006.

[16] In 2010, after the disappointed result of the regional elections of the ruling UMP, Nicolas Sarkozy called Alain Juppé to come back in government.

Later, this attitude has been condemned or badly evaluated by experts or politicians, estimating that the destabilization of nation-states has permitted the extension of Islamic extremism, but Juppé has maintained his positions.

Endorsing Nicolas Sarkozy for the 2012 presidential election, he deplored the role of biased media in the campaign and dismissed François Hollande's economic program as "dangerous".

Two months later, following the resignation of Jean-François Copé from the head of the UMP, it was announced that former Prime Ministers Alain Juppé, François Fillon and Jean-Pierre Raffarin would rule the party until a new leadership election in October.

However, his judicial conviction and his record as prime minister of France attracted criticism, as well as his positions on immigration and Islam, mainly in the right wing of his party.

[19] On 13 February 2019, it was announced that Juppé would take over Lionel Jospin's seat on the Conseil Constitutionnel in March 2019, which entailed his resignation as mayor of Bordeaux and president of its metropolitan area.

[20][21] At the press conference organized the following day, the former prime minister lamented an "unhealthy public spirit" and the physical and verbal violence of the political environment.

But fifteen years later, he convinced Jacques Chirac to agree to the Maastricht Treaty, while the party was strongly divided on the subject.

But the same year, interviewed on the public television channel France 2, Juppé strongly advocated for the creation of a European federation to respond to the euro crisis.

Reacting to the Brexit vote in 2016, he refused the idea of a similar referendum in France, thinking it would be "a present to Madame Le Pen".

The same year, the general meeting of the RPR led to strict propositions : borders closing, suspension of immigration, and declarations of the incompatibility between Islam and French laws.

In a 2011 Le Parisien interview, talking about the Arab Spring, he declared: "Do not stigmatize all those who call themselves islamists, there are people attached to Islam and ready to accept the basic laws of democracy".

In October 2016 during a speech he urged overhaul of Le Touquet Agreement[27] calling for the UK border to be moved from Calais to Kent.