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Milestone for the president who mirrors his people
Today, Jacques Chirac reaches 40 years in public office. So how did the fickle, food-loving Frenchman do it - and what has he achieved?
Jon Henley in Paris
Monday March 14, 2005
The Guardian
Nobody at the Elysée will say whether he plans to mark the occasion, but the palace's tenant of the moment reaches something of a milestone today: exactly 40 years ago, Jacques Chirac was elected to public office for the first time.
History records that on March 14 1965, during the first round of that year's municipal elections, 874 of the 1,029 voters registered in the small south-western village of Sainte-Féréole returned Chirac, J as one of their local councillors.
It is a safe bet that none would have imagined that four decades later, the hale and energetic 32-year-old they elected would be halfway through his second term as president of the French republic, and reportedly debating with himself whether to run for a third.
But Chirac rose fast, and has hung around at or near the summit of French politics for a very long time. He first entered the cabinet, as a junior social affairs minister in George Pompidou's government, just two years after winning his seat on Sainte-Féréole council.
The final slope before the peak was attained a mere seven years later: the first of his two stints as France's prime minister was as early as 1974. And this May, he will celebrate a decade at the very top, in the post the French call " le premier d'entre nous ".
Even in a country where politicians are traditionally patient and careers are for life, the man's longevity is remarkable. In the year he turns 73, the question is: how has he has managed it and what has he actually achieved?
"First and foremost, Chirac is an energy," said the writer and broadcaster Bertrand Delais, author of the first of a plethora of commentaries due out this anniversary year. "That's what's kept him going - an extraordinary energy in the service of a boundless ambition."
He works hard at his popularity. In the early days, he kept a bucket of iced water in the back of his car to plunge his aching fingers into after every campaign stop. "In this country, everyone has either shaken Chirac's hand or knows someone who has," says a current cabinet minister.
But for many observers, the real secret of his success is that the French see themselves in him. He is " un bon gars "; a good bloke, down-to-earth, no snob. Like them (certainly like their rugby team), he is not beaten even when he's down, never stronger than when he is up against it.
"He can reinvent himself and come back from the worst of whitewashes," says one pollster, Antoine Chaballier. "He just has to win one more time."
Also like the French, Mr Chirac appears to be a bit dodgy: if his voters fiddle their tax returns and fail to pay their parking tickets, their leader has been accused of indulging in jobs for the boys, electoral list-padding, illicit party fundraising schemes and luxury foreign holidays paid for in cash. The French like to feel they've got away with something naughty; Mr Chirac's many corruption scandals have not harmed him in the slightest.
Like the French also, he loves his food: he once came close to causing a diplomatic incident in Berlin by insisting, when the menu offered the choice of saucisse or charcuterie, on having both. And he has a big heart: one journalist recounts him spending half an hour looking for the mother of a little girl lost on the Place Saint Sulpice (he eventually found her in a cafe).
Again like the French, he is fickle. His multiple policy about-turns have actually endeared him to his electorate. Once an anti-European Gaullist, he is now the staunchest defender of the EU constitution; having exploded nuclear bombs in the Pacific, he is now a keen green; eager to hang out with the anti-globalisation crowd these days, he once came up with a package of free-market economic reforms so tough that they cost him a general election.
"Where commentators see the meanderings of an unstable mind, the French see the reflection of their own contradictions," says Christophe Barbier, political editor of L'Express. "His changes of direction haven't scared them, but reassured them about themselves. In fact, it's when he's most ideological and sure of himself that they hand him an electoral hammering."
Mr Delais concurs. "Chirac is like us," he said. "De Gaulle was our father, Mitterrand made us dream, Giscard was an economics professor. Chirac is the cousin who has made good. His talent is feeling what concerns us, intuiting the demand of the moment. He doesn't have convictions, or if he does, they're not political ones - he has sentiments."
There are, of course, some constants, and they are to his credit. Mr Chirac, despite temptation, has never had any serious truck with the far right. He has always fought anti-semitism, and was the first French head of state to publicly recognise, in 1995, the responsibility of Vichy France in the Holocaust.
His wife, Bernadette, calls him "the St Bernard". Pompidou called him "the Bulldozer". Others have dubbed him "the Weathervane", even "Superliar". For his political victims, he is "the Killer". But whatever they know him as, there is now, after 40 years, a kind of compassion between the French and their head of state.
Is that enough? De Gaulle created postwar France; Pompidou modernised its industry; Giscard legalised abortion; Mitterrand abolished the death penalty, built monuments, reformed French capitalism, generally dragged the nation into the 20th century. And Mr Chirac?
"The president of proximity is not the president for posterity," says Mr Barbier. In 40 years in politics, he has left no permanent mark on France, done nothing about unemployment or undertaken any major reform beyond, perhaps, abolishing military service.
"He has, basically, done nothing," Mr Delais said. "But that's because he believes in nothing - except, perhaps, in the way we live in this country."
Mr Chirac is not stupid: his success rests on his relationship with the French. He knows that in this most reform-phobic of nations, actually doing anything might ruin that for ever.
