Member of the European Parliament, 1994–1997 Jacob became a
Member of the European Parliament in the
1994 elections. In parliament, he served on the
Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development. In addition to his committee assignments, he was part of the parliament's delegation for relations with
Ukraine,
Belarus and
Moldova.
Career in government, 2002–2007 Following the
2002 elections, Jacob was appointed to the government of
Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. He first served as Minister Delegate in charge of the Family from 2002 until 2004. In 2004, he became Minister Delegate in charge of SMEs, Trade, Crafts, Liberal Professions and Consumer Affairs, which later became a fully-fledged ministry. In 2005, in the government of
Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, he was appointed Minister for the Civil Service.
Member of the National Assembly, 2007–present In parliament, Jacob served on the Committee on Economic Affairs (2007–2009); the Committee on Sustainable Development and Spatial Planning (2009–2010, 2012–2017); and the Committee on Defence (2010–2012). When
Jean-François Copé resigned from his position as chairman of the UMP group in the National Assembly to become the party's secretary general in late 2010, Jacob succeeded him after defeating
Jean Leonetti. In 2011 Jacob caused controversy when he described
Dominique Strauss-Kahn as an urban intellectual – a "
bobo," short for "bourgeois-bohemian" – and said that Strauss-Kahn did not represent "the image of France, the image of rural France, the image of the France of terroirs and territories". Both French and foreign media interpreted this notion of rootless cosmopolitanism, of being out of touch with the soil and the mystery of "
la France profonde," as an old trope for foreign and Jewish influence. In response, the president of the
Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF),
Richard Prasquier, called Jacob's comments "a very great clumsiness". In 2012, Jacob was re-elected in the first round with 117 votes, ahead of
Xavier Bertrand (63 votes) and
Hervé Gaymard (17 votes). In the UMP's
2012 leadership primaries, he endorsed Copé. Under Jacob's leadership, the UMP (and later LR) parliamentary group asked for several
votes of no-confidence in the government of
Prime Minister Manuel Valls in 2014, 2015 and 2016. In the Republicans'
2016 presidential primaries, Jacob endorsed
Nicolas Sarkozy as the party's candidate for the office of
President of France; the party's majority, however, voted for
François Fillon to run in the
2017 presidential election. In March 2017, when the
Fillon affair led several staff members to leave the presidential candidate's campaign team, Jacob was appointed campaign coordinator, in tandem with
Bruno Retailleau. Following the
legislative elections in June 2017, Jacob was re-elected chairman of the LR parliamentary group, in a vote against
Damien Abad. In addition, he has since been serving on the Defence Committee and the Committee on Sustainable Development and Spatial Planning again. In the Republicans'
2017 leadership election, Jacob endorsed
Laurent Wauquiez. Under Jacob's leadership, the Republicans' parliamentary group asked for a
vote of no-confidence in the government of
Prime Minister Édouard Philippe over the
Benalla affair in 2018. In October 2019, after Wauquiez's resignation and in the context of a series of electoral losses, Jacob emerged as a consensus candidate for the
LR leadership. In an internal party vote, he won against
Julien Aubert and
Guillaume Larrivé.
Damien Abad succeeded him as leader of the LR parliamentary group. Under Jacob's leadership, LR won more than half of the country's small towns in the
2020 French municipal elections; at the same time, however, the party lost in larger cities it had held for decades, including Marseille and Bordeaux. By 2021, Jacob said he had "no ambition" to campaign for the
2022 French presidential election. At the Republicans' national convention in December 2021, he chaired the 11-member committee which oversaw the party's selection of its candidate for the elections. Ahead of the Republicans' 2022 convention, he endorsed
Éric Ciotti as the party's chairman. == Political positions ==