Jacques Chirac, who was president of France for 12 years, has died at the age of 86, his family has announced. Chirac was a formidable political animal with enormous charm and great energy, which were crucial assets in his hard fought ascent to presidency. He loved the simple pleasures of beer and tête de veau, or calf’s head. The man-of-the-people image was not cynically cultivated: his political batteries gained a genuine charge from pressing the flesh and kissing babies.
Yet when he won the ultimate political prize in 1995 at his third attempt and installed himself at the Elysée palace, he made little use of his powers to tackle France’s problems. He was more a political survivor than a statesman; a dealmaker, not a strategist. The fifth president of the Fifth Republic, he was the last to serve the constitution’s original seven-year term and the first to initiate changes reducing the mandate to five years to coincide with general elections.
He acquired an unrivalled experience of foreign affairs and rightly saw himself as the doyen of European leaders. But his endeavours were ultimately undermined by the French electorate’s rejection of the planned EU constitution in a 2005 referendum. The constitution was a French idea. The No vote in France killed the project and eroded France’s traditional role as the motor of European integration alongside Germany.
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At home he had no clear political credo, veering between bombastic nationalism, cryptosocialism, old-style protectionism and wary liberalism. The unhappy experience of his first two years at the Elysée was to have a lasting impact on his behaviour.
On election, he encouraged Alain Juppé, his prime minister, to embark on an abortive liberalising programme. Mr Juppé’s insensitive handling of proposals to end public sector privileges provoked trade union protests that paralysed France in the winter of 1995-96. Some of the measures had to be shelved — but Chirac then further miscalculated by calling early parliamentary elections in 1997, which the president’s rightwing supporters lost.
