Chirac a king of hearts
DEAD AT 86: FORMER FRENCH PRESIDENT A POPULAR ‘BULLDOZER’
Twice elected, his 12 years in the palace made him second longest-serving leader.
Jacques Chirac, who died yesterday at the age of 86, was a charismatic giant of French post-war politics whose popular touch gave him enduring appeal to voters – even after a conviction for graft.
Twice elected head of state in 1995 and 2002, his 12 years in the Elysee Palace made him France’s second longest-serving president after his Socialist predecessor, Francois Mitterrand.
On the international stage, Chirac helped spearhead opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 – a stance which angered the United States.
“War is always a last resort, always an admission of failure, always the worst of solutions, because it brings death and misery,” he said at the time.
An instinctive conservative but capable of quickly switching positions, Chirac also served two stints as prime minister in 197476 and 1986-88 and was mayor of his native Paris from 1977-1995.
Winning people over came easily to the career politician who cultivated an image as an amiable, beer-drinking, down-toearth, slightly buffoonish figure who understood French people.
The son of a businessman father and housewife mother, he took the obvious track for any aspiring politician by winning a place at the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration, which has groomed a long line of presidents.
Handsome, and with the powerful physique of the rugby player he was in his youth, Chirac moved swiftly into politics – starting off near the top, in 1962, as chief of staff to then president Georges Pompidou, who dubbed him “the bulldozer”.
Within five years, Chirac was a junior minister and had secured a parliamentary seat in the central Correze region.
When students took to the streets of Paris in May 1968, Chirac helped negotiate a truce that avoided major bloodshed.
In 1974, at the age of 41, he was named prime minister under president Valery Giscard d’Estaing. But his pre-presidential career was mostly marked by his 18 years as mayor of Paris from 1977, which he used as a launchpad for the presidency.
After two failed bids for the presidency in 1981 and 1988, Chirac finally succeeded in winning top office in 1995.
But two years later he gambled on dissolving parliament in the hope of securing a mandate for free-market economic reforms.
It proved a miscalculation, with the electorate swinging left, forcing Chirac to see out the rest of his first term in a paralysing “cohabition” with a Socialist-dominated parliament.
The 2002 election was handed to him on a plate when he found himself in a second-round contest with far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and the electorate rallied massively behind him.
His second term saw France grapple with debt and competitiveness problems, which plague it to this day.
His reputation as a ladies’ man – he once said “I never overdid it” – did not make life easy for his wife, Bernadette, an aristocrat he met at university.
The Chiracs’ marriage endured to the end but Bernadette confirmed in 2001 that it had been tested to breaking point. –