The former French president Jacques Chirac,
a self-styled affable rogue who had one of the longest political careers in
Europe, has died aged 86.
For several years he had suffered from memory loss
said to be linked to a form of Alzheimer’s disease or to the minor stroke that
he had while in office.
Chirac, who was head of state from 1995 to 2007,
boasted one of the longest continuous political careers in Europe – twice
president, twice prime minister and 18 years as mayor of Paris.
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| The former French president Jacques Chirac |
Although his time as president was marked by
inaction and political stagnation, and despite having left France just as
divided and struggling with mounting debt, inequalities and unemployment as he
had found it, his debonair persona meant that in retirement he was embraced
as one of
France’s favourite politicians.
Chirac will be remembered internationally for
leading France’s strong opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq
in 2003, when approval ratings for his anti-war stance in
France soared to 90%.
“War is always a last resort. It is always proof of failure. It is always the
worst of solutions, because it brings death and misery,” he said a week before
the US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq. He warned that any occupation of Iraq
would prove a “nightmare”.
One of Chirac’s greatest gestures at home was to
reconcile the nation with its history by acknowledging that France as a whole
was responsible for the roundup of some
76,000 Jews sent to Nazi death camps during the second world
war.
His vow that the “criminal folly” of the German occupation was “assisted
by the French people, by the French state” lifted the last taboo of the
occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime. His apology was the first
time a postwar French head of state had fully acknowledged France’s role.
Chirac will be remembered above all as a master in
the art of political seduction. For decades he charmed the public
with his endless handshaking, patting of cows’ backsides and shaking of dogs’
paws on his tours round France – a beer-drinking, Gitanes-smoking man of the
people who was able to eat five lunches in one afternoon on the election trail.
He shook so many hands while criss-crossing France that he used
to plunge his fingers into a bucket of ice at the end of the day or wear
plasters to protect from the blisters he got from his powerful grip on
pensioners and farmers. He had a visceral need to reach out and touch people –
whether it was hugging an elderly voter or flamboyantly kissing the hand of the
German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
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| Jacques Chirac speaks with George W. Bush and Tony Blair, right, looks on during the G8 summit in 2005 |
Chirac was
much mocked, often satirised and once nicknamed “Superliar”. After a historic trial in 2011, he became the first former president to be convicted of corruption following embezzlement charges in a party funding
scandal when he was mayor of Paris. Yet he was seen to embody the French
president’s role as republican monarch with a kind of panache that Nicolas
Sarkozy and François Hollande would later be found by the public to be lacking.
Politically he was known as the “weathervane”, for
his ability to shift as it suited him. He went from championing state control
in the 1970s to Ronald Reagan’s free-market liberalism in the 1980s.
When he
was elected president in 1995, he shocked the world by resuming nuclear testing
in atoll
explosions in the South Pacific, then took to the stage as an
eco-champion at the 2002 Earth summit, warning: “Our house is burning while we
look elsewhere.” He went from virulent eurosceptic in the late 1970s to staunch
euro-defender 10 years later.
During more than 43 years in politics, Chirac was
described as a “bulldozer” and “killer” of rivals. Born to well-off but
progressive parents in Paris, what really marked him was his military service
on the frontline during the Algerian war – he was the last French president to
have direct experience of combat and it left him both a fan of military
strategy and cautious about war.
He was a figure in French political life from the
early 1960s, starting as an adviser to the prime minister George Pompidou,
becoming an MP in rural Corrèze and then a minister. Before he finally became
president in 1995, he founded a political party, the Gaullist Rally for the
Republic, served twice as prime minister and failed twice at a
presidential election. It was his ability to take knocks and get up again that
proved part of his charm.
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| Jacques Chirac with Angela Merkel after talks in Meseberg, February 2007. |
When Chirac became president in 1995, he promised
to heal the “social
fracture”, the crippling unemployment, division and inequalities
that plagued France. But instead, his government’s contested pension reform and
planned austerity package of social security cuts prompted up to 2 million
people to take to the streets, paralysing France in the worst strikes since May
1968.
His term was then hamstrung by his disastrous decision to call
parliamentary elections in 1997 in a bid to boost his support. The Socialists
won, forcing Chirac into uncomfortable power-sharing.
In 2002, he was re-elected president with 82% of
the vote after the Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked the
nation by getting into the final round run-off. Chirac won because
much of the leftwing electorate voting for him in order to stop the far-right
leader.
He later said one of his biggest regrets was not having formed a mixed
national-unity government with ministers from all political sides. Instead, he
stuck to his own brand of centre-right politics. In 2002 he agreed common
agricultural policy payments with Germany, securing his popularity.
At home, he was most criticised for failing to
steward change in France, avoiding reforms, and allowing inequalities to
fester, symbolised by the 2005
urban riots on housing estates across France. The same year he
called a referendum
on approving the proposed EU constitution but then failed to
sell the idea to the electorate, who voted no. It was a devastating blow. His
popularity ratings near the end of his term were the lowest of any president
since the war.
Among his success stories in office was his fight to
improve road safety which was calculated to have saved 8,500
lives in four years. He ended compulsory military service and reduced the
presidential term from seven years to five.
He was a lifelong source of barbed quotes and digs,
famously asking in reference to Margaret Thatcher: “What more does the bag want,
my balls on a platter?” He once said of Britain: “You can’t trust people who
cook as badly as that.”
But he also made comments he would regret. “Africa is
not ready for democracy,” he told a group of African leaders in the early
1990s. When mayor of Paris in 1991, he made a controversial speech about
immigration and talked of French people being disturbed by “the noise and the
smell”, sparking outrage.
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| Jacques Chirac and Margaret Thatcher meet in Paris, in 1975 |
Like François Mitterrand before him, Chirac wanted
to leave behind a great cultural project and created Paris’s Quai Branly
museum, a riverside monument to himself as the “great defender” of
African, Asian, American and other indigenous cultures.
Throughout his presidency, he was dogged by the
sleaze scandals from his days as mayor at Paris city hall. He claimed immunity
as president, but when he left office he swiftly became the first former
president convicted of a crime. Aged 79, he was handed a two-year suspended
prison sentence after being found guilty of embezzling public funds as Paris
mayor in order to illegally finance the right-wing party he led.
His lawyer, Georges Kiejman, said at the time:
“What I hope is that this ruling doesn’t change in any way the deep affection
the French feel legitimately for Jacques Chirac.”
It was a mark of Chirac’s extraordinary life and
luck that it didn’t. - The Guardian
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