I.

Introduction

Chirac, Jacques René (1932- ), French politician, Prime Minister (1974-1976; 1986-1988), and President of France (1995-2007). Chirac was born in Paris, the son of a bank employee who later joined the Potez aircraft company as an executive. Educated at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the National School of Political Sciences, and Harvard University, Chirac served in Algeria before joining the École Nationale d’Administration as a preparation for a career in the French civil service. Later he fell under the spell of Charles de Gaulle on the latter’s return to the forefront of French politics during the Algerian War of Independence.

II.

Early Career

In 1962 Chirac was assigned to the office of Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, who was impressed by his energy and competence. At Pompidou’s suggestion, in 1967 Chirac ran as a Gaullist for a seat in the National Assembly to represent Ussel in the Corrèze region of France, where his family had originated, and was given a post in the Ministry of Social Affairs. By 1972 Chirac was Minister of Agriculture, earning a formidable reputation as a champion of French farmers’ interests.

Pompidou died in 1974, and Chirac switched his loyalty to the new president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who, though not himself a Gaullist, appointed Chirac prime minister in the same year. Chirac resigned in 1976, complaining of Giscard’s unwillingness to give him authority, and by the close of the year had founded his own party, the Rally for the Republic. In 1977, Chirac won the mayoralty of Paris, a prelude to his first bid for the presidency against Giscard in 1981. On this occasion he won 18 per cent of the vote in the first round of the elections: François Mitterrand, the Socialist candidate, won by a narrow margin in the second round to begin a presidency that was to last 14 years. However, in 1986 the Conservative parties regained control of the National Assembly, and Chirac became prime minister a second time for a period of cohabitation with the Socialist Mitterrand as president. During this tenure, Chirac put a brake on unemployment, which had exceeded 2.5 million, cut taxes on employers, abolished the wealth tax on the rich, and sold off businesses previously nationalized by the Socialists. In 1988 he again challenged Mitterrand for the presidency but was beaten at the polls, 54 per cent to 45 per cent.

III.

First Term as President

Thereafter, Chirac bided his time, concentrating on his duties as an efficient and forceful mayor of Paris. When, in the elections of March 1993, the various Conservative forces won a huge parliamentary majority, Chirac stood aside for a fellow Gaullist, Édouard Balladur, to become Mitterrand’s last prime minister, while he himself concentrated on preparing a third bid for the presidency in the spring of 1995. The campaign was a harsh one: Chirac, after overcoming the initial popularity of his Conservative rival Édouard Balladur, finished second to the Socialist Lionel Jospin in the first round of the election. However, in the second round against Jospin, Chirac won by a margin of over 4 percentage points on a platform of commitment to European unity, European monetary union, and an all-out attack on unemployment, which was now perceived as France’s most urgent political problem.

Taking office in May 1995, Chirac plunged France into international controversy in June with a series of nuclear tests in the South Pacific atoll of Muniroa, a French possession, which brought widespread condemnation, and riots in Tahiti. Chirac attempted to defuse the global response, which included boycotts of French goods, by committing France to a future nuclear test-ban treaty. He also distanced himself from domestic criticism of economic austerity measures, leaving his prime minister, Alain Juppé, a close ally of Chirac, to conduct negotiations with trade unions and other interest groups. In December 1996, with strikes and policy reversals besetting economic strategy and judicial investigations unearthing evidence of extensive corruption in the Paris city administration during his tenure as mayor, Chirac defended his government’s record during a television interview in which he made controversial remarks about the French people’s reluctance to change.

In April 1997 Chirac called an early general election despite his government’s commanding majority, ostensibly to nip the electoral challenge of the far-right National Front in the bud, to revitalize his institutional reform programme, and to give a new mandate for final negotiations on the proposed European single currency. He also reportedly hoped to take advantage of the French Left’s short-term difficulties. In the event, French voters turned against Chirac’s right-wing allies, apparently reacting to his government’s failure to reduce unemployment as promised and to the stresses of structural economic reform. His unpopular prime minister Alain Juppé resigned after the first round of voting on May 25 in an attempt to restore the governing coalition’s fortunes, but voters nonetheless elected the Socialists under Lionel Jospin in the second round on June 1, in a result seen as a condemnation of Chirac’s presidency. Chirac’s foreign policy initiatives also were embarrassingly defeated in July 1997 when French proposals to admit Slovenia and Romania to NATO were rejected, and France’s readmission to the full NATO command structure was shelved.

From March 1999 Chirac steered the French effort in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) offensive against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia over Yugoslav actions in Kosovo, regaining considerable popularity in the process. However, faced with disarray in the ranks of his own party, split over European policy, he refused to countenance their calls for a more combative stance with his socialist prime minister and a presidential election, to reinforce the strength of his own position, before his seven year term was complete. In February 2000 he led the European Union opposition to the Austrian coalition government that included the far-right Freedom Party of Jörg Haider, whose views upon immigration and nationalistic attitude towards European integration were regarded as “intolerable”.

The French electorate voted to reduce the length of the presidential term of office from seven to five years in September; a move that Chirac had supported. At the Nice summit that concluded the French presidency of the EU in December, Chirac fought the German demand for more votes in the Council of Ministers. He also called for the new European Rapid Reaction Force to be able to act independently of NATO and in January 2001 he attacked the new United States administration’s plans for a missile defence system. The continued rumblings of corruption scandals finally appeared to be catching up with Chirac and his coalition when the right lost the Parisian mayoralty in March for the first time since its inception in 1977. A further scandal emerged in July, involving the use of public funds for family trips during his time as mayor of Paris, but despite this Chirac was still leading in opinion polls, with voters’ concerns over crime and the economy greater than the ongoing scandals. Chirac received a further boost following his declaration of 'solidarity' with the United States after the terrorist attack of September 11; his supportive stance was widely echoed throughout the country. In October, France's highest court ruled that Chirac would not have to answer corruption claims in court while he was president as he was protected by presidential immunity; however, he could be tried following the end of his term.

IV.

Second Term as President

Chirac gained the greatest share of the votes in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, held in April. He entered the run-off in May with the National Front politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, a surprise runner-up in the poll. Chirac was comfortably re-elected president having attracted the left’s anti-Le Pen vote. The five-year period of cohabitation between the centre-right president and the centre-left prime minister ended when Jospin resigned after the election. Chirac was further bolstered by the success of centre-right parties in the June parliamentary elections. The Union pour la Majorité Presidentielle (UMP), a coalition of groups supporting Chirac, won an absolute majority in the National Assembly. Following the election, he asked the interim prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, to form an administration. During the 2002 Bastille Day celebrations, an assassination attempt was made on Chirac as he reviewed soldiers in an open-top Jeep. He was unhurt in the incident. The would-be assassin, Maxime Brunerie, was believed to have been acting alone, despite his connections with extreme right-wing groups. Chirac proved himself a leading critic of the aggressive efforts of the US administration to secure the disarmament of Iraq, asserting in March 2003 that France, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, would veto any resolution authorizing war. This stance contributed to the warm reception Chirac received in Algeria the same month, when he became the first French president to visit the country since its independence in 1962. In January 2004 Juppé, regarded as Chirac’s chosen successor as president, was one of 21 defendants found guilty of overseeing the illegal payment of RPR workers during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Juppé was the party’s secretary-general. Although the accusations were levelled at close associates of Chirac, the president himself has remained protected by the immunity from prosecution that accompanies the office.

The regional elections held in March 2004 delivered another blow to Chirac’s standing. The UMP was left trailing the Socialists in almost all areas of France, and Raffarin’s government offered its resignation. Chirac reappointed Raffarin, however, as head of a new government, which remained committed to a programme of public sector reform aimed at reducing the country’s stubbornly high budget deficit. In July, Chirac announced that France would hold a referendum on whether to support the proposed constitution for the European Union, drawn up by a convention under Giscard d’Estaing. The campaign was hard fought, and Chirac staked a great deal of his authority on its success, making three broadcasts to the nation appealing for voters to support the constitution. However, the increasing unpopularity of both Chirac and the Raffarin government contributed to the eventual rejection of the constitution when the vote was held in May 2005. Raffarin subsequently resigned, and Chirac controversially appointed Dominique de Villepin, a close ally who had served as a minister in Raffarin’s government but was not an elected member of the legislature, as the new prime minister.

In March 2006 Villepin’s government ran into difficulties when it attempted to introduce legislation liberalizing employment laws for those under the age of 26. The law provoked massive, student-led demonstrations across France. Chirac appeared on television to make a national address, announcing some concessions on the law. However, these failed to assuage the anxieties that had produced the demonstrations, and they did not cease until the law had been withdrawn—a severe blow to both President Chirac and his government.

In May 2007 the UMP candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, a former protégé of Chirac but more recently a political rival, defeated the Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal in the election to succeed to the presidency.