Isabelle Folquet
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Isabelle Folquet is the Pantocratorian Treasurer and one of the most prominent members of Thibault Drapeur's frontbench. She is a member of the Pantocratorian Imperial Parliament for the seat of St Marc Parish in Adrienople. She obtained preselection for her seat as the Pantocratorian Socialist Alliance candidate through the PSA-affiliated Adrienople Council of Unions, of which she was general-secretary prior to running for Parliament. She is one of the younger members of the Imperial Cabinet, but is both extremely ambitious and hard-working, and is regarded by many as a potential successor to Thibault Drapeur.
Early life
She was born Isabelle Blanc, the second of four children (and only daughter) of Jean-Paul and Louise Blanc in Adrienople. Her father, Jean-Paul, worked on Adrienople's wharves and was a life-long member of the Pantocratorian Wharf and Dock Workers Union (alternately referred to as the Wharfies or the Dockers), although he never held any position within the union except for occasionally proxy delgate to the Adrienople Council of Unions. Although they were both working class people with very limited educations, both of her parents emphasised the importance of education and supplemented her very rudimentary education in the Church-run local schools with books of all kinds, but especially socialist authors. Her elder brother, Philippe, followed in his father's footsteps, although enjoyed greater success at union elections - he is now President of the Pantocratorian Wharf and Dock Workers Union, and as such is a member of the executive of both the Council of Pantocratorian Trade Unions and Pantocratorian Socialist Alliance. One of her two younger brothers, Jean, joined the Pantocratorian Imperial Navy (in which he serves as a Master Petty Officer), and the other, Charles, is a research fellow at Demetrius University in New Constantinople.
Life before politics
After topping her class in the final year of secondary school, Isabelle won a full scholarship to study at Louis University, in New Rome, where she studied economics. At the age of twenty-two she graduated, and married one of her lecturers, Doctor Michél Folquet, a prominent member of the Pantocratorian Socialist Society. The couple lived in New Rome, and Isabelle was employed in the Department of the Imperial Treasury. With the exception of her father's death in 1991, the first two years of their marriage proved to be quite pleasant. Years later as Treasurer she would cause some small controversy by admitting that during this period she employed contraception (which was then illegal in Pantocratoria).
In 1992, the United Christian Front won the election for the Pantocratorian Imperial Parliament, winning all five hundred and forty seats in what many regard as a rigged election result arranged through Princess Irene's ties with the Pantocratorian Congregation for the Protection of the Creed. A global recession followed, the impact of which was even more keenly felt for Pantocratorian workers as Prince Basil's Government de-regulated the Pantocratorian Ducat and the labour market. Isabelle's husband, Michél, was arrested leading a peaceful protest of students and academics conducting a sit-in at the Palais du Parlement - the couple was forced to spend all their savings on Michél's bail. Two days after his arrest, Isabelle was fired from her job in the Department of the Imperial Treasury on the grounds that she had brought the department into disrepute - no explanation was offered.
In 1994, Michél disappeared. He had remained active in the anti-United Christian Front protests, and had been arrested several times, alternately by police and Ministry of Cultural Development officers. Michél's body was found eight months later, displaying evidence of prolonged captivity and even torture before finally he was taken into the forests outside New Rome and shot in the head, execution-style, with a service revolver. Shortly after Michél's funeral, the Ministry of Cultural Development arrested all of the members of the Louis University Chapter of the Pantocratorian Socialist Society, including Isabelle, on a variety of charges ranging from possession of seditious or corrupting literature, to serious dresscode violations. All but the most junior members subsequently had more serious charges brought against them and were imprisoned. Isabelle escaped lightly - her head was shaved in response to the charge against her of "Dresscode Violation (Hair Dye)", and she served two hundred hours of community service.
Adrienople Council of Unions
Unable to work in any but the most menial jobs in New Rome on account of the fact that everytime a potential employer ran the required security check on her, the police reported her as "Category Orange: Non-Violent Subversive", she moved back in with her mother in Adrienople. Her brother Philippe arranged for her to get a job in the Pantocratorian Wharf and Dock Workers Union despite the fact that she didn't have the mandatory one-year minimum experience working on the docks usually required to be an official in that union - the executive agreed that Isabelle's circumstances and her father's long union membership were adequate to set the requirement aside. She threw herself entirely into her work, and quickly gained a reputation as the best union representative in Adrienople. In 1996 she was nominated by the Dockers as their delegate to the Adrienople Council of Unions, in 1998 she was elected Vice-President of the Adrienople Council of Unions, and then in 2001 she was elected its General-Secretary.
Political Career
In 2004 when the Pantocratorian Socialist Society became the Pantocratorian Socialist Alliance after Emperor Andreus' decree that anybody could now register a political party and run for the Imperial Parliament, Isabelle Folquet recommended to the Adrienople Council of Unions Executive that the council affiliate to the Pantocratorian Socialist Alliance - the recommendation was carried unanimously. She immediately won pre-selection for the Imperial Parliament. Her prominence within the Pantocratorian trade union movement and her supporters in the Pantocratorian Socialist Alliance executive ensured that when the Pantocratorian Socialist Alliance formed government with the Constantinople Party, she received a prominent position in the cabinet.
Unlike the often melancholy Drapeur and the down-right abrasive Demetrios Raoul, Isabelle Folquet is an extremely personable woman, and is well-liked both within her party and in the community as a whole. She has aligned herself more with the idealistic left of the Pantocratorian Socialist Alliance than with the pragmatic right (with which Raoul is aligned), although she's careful not to associate with the extremists in the hard left. A more formal parliamentary faction began to form around her in the wake of widespread dissatisfaction on the backbench with the way Drapeur pandered to the Constantinople Party with the Greek Rite Act without getting their support for several important reform bills. Her critics have accused her of lacking the administrative talent of some of the Drapeur Government's ministers, but they were more or less silenced by her mid-financial year budget statement in late 2005, which was almost the size of a complete budget, and which was the first one to be completely Folquet's own (her previous two budget statements largely being left over Pantocratoria First Party Government economic and fiscal policy directions).
| Preceded by: Isaac Comnenus |
Treasurer of Pantocratoria 2004-Present |
Succeeded by: - |
