A farmer, Jacob served in positions of responsibility in farm trade unions, local, départemental, regional then national. He was the President of the CNJA from 1992 to 1994.
Following the 2002 elections, Jacob was appointed to the government of Prime MinisterJean-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.
In parliament, Jacob served on the Committee on Economic Affairs ; the Committee on Sustainable Development and Spatial Planning ; and the Committee on Defence. 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 2012, he was re-elected in the first round with 117 votes, ahead of Xavier Bertrand and Hervé Gaymard. In the UMP's 2012 leadership primaries, he endorsed Copé. Under Jacob's leadership, the UMP 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.
Political positions
Foreign policy
When President François Hollande and the French government sought to bolster the case for military action against President Bashar al-Assad’s government amid the Syrian civil war in 2013, Jacob held that an intervention “could only be justified in the framework of the United Nations” and expressed concern that France was out of step with its neighbors, including Germany. In 2014, Jacob criticized the Socialist majority for backing France's recognition of the State of Palestine as a move to "add fuel to the fire in a region that doesn’t need that at all." Ahead of Hollande's 2015 visit to meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Jacob called on him to push for an end to the European Union sanctions on Russia over its activities in Ukraine. In July 2019, Jacob voted against the French ratification of the European Union’s Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada.
Domestic policy
Amid a 2019 public debate in France about women wearing hijabs in public, Jacob demanded that clothing restrictions applied to teachers and students be extended to parents who sign up for class trips. In an interview with Le Figaro newspaper, he said: “The veil should be banned on all school time. Not just on school premises.”
Controversy
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, Richard Prasquier, called Jacob's comments “a very great clumsiness.”
