Chirac, Jacques René

Chirac, Jacques René (1932- ), French politician, Prime Minister (1974-1976; 1986-1988), and President of France (1995- ). 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.

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.

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, 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. In May 1998 Chirac was involved in scandals over corruption in the Paris city government during his period as mayor. 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.