Jacques Chirac
Jacques René Chirac (Paris, November 29, 1932-Ibidem, September 26, 2019) was a French politician who held the posts of Prime Minister (1974-1976 and 1986-1988), Mayor of Paris (1977-1995) and President of the French Republic (1995-2007).
Biography
Born on November 29, 1932 in Paris, he studied at the College Louis-le-Grand, where he obtained his baccalaureate. He later studied at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris.
He married Bernadette Chodron de Courcel in March 1956, with whom he had two daughters, Laurence and Claude.
He lived in Algeria from 1956 to 1958, before entering the National School of Administration (ENA) in preparation for his career as a French senior civil service. After having shown marked sympathy with the communists in his youth, he carried out his political career in the ranks of the parliamentary right, adhering to different Gaullist groups.
Graduated from the National School of Administration, he was a senior retired official of the Court of Accounts.
Political career
Since 1962 he held various State secretaries together with Prime Minister Georges Pompidou. At his suggestion, in 1967 he presented himself in the Gaullist candidacy for the National Assembly and went on to hold a prominent position in the Ministry of Social Affairs. By 1972 he was Minister of Agriculture.
Pompidou died in 1974 and Chirac, then Minister of the Interior, obtained a majority for the new president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, although he was not a Gaullist. Chirac was appointed prime minister in May of that year, but resigned in August 1976 complaining of Giscard's presidentialism and at the end of that year he founded his own party: Rally for the Republic (RPR, in its French acronym). In 1977 he obtained a majority in the municipal elections of Paris, with which he held the position of mayor of the French capital, a prelude to his first candidacy for the presidency against Giscard himself in the 1981 presidential elections, in which the candidate of the Socialist Party François Mitterrand was narrowly victorious, beginning a presidential term that lasted 14 years (until May 1995).
In 1986 he was appointed Prime Minister during the period of 'cohabitation' with the socialist François Mitterrand as President of the Republic. In 1988 he faced him again in the presidential elections, from which he was defeated (54% to 45%). After that failure he concentrated on his work as mayor of Paris. When, in the legislative elections of March 1993, the various conservative forces obtained a large parliamentary majority, Chirac remained on the sidelines, allowing Édouard Balladur to become Mitterrand's last prime minister, while he prepared to face a third attempt to reach the presidency in the spring of 1995.
Presidency (1995-2007)
First term (1995-2002)
Chirac got the victory against the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin. By becoming president of the French Republic, he also became co-prince of Andorra, holding a monarchical and a republican office at the same time.
In that same year, he ordered the resumption of nuclear tests in French Polynesia, which had ended in January 1996, after numerous national and international protests. For this reason he was awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize in 1996.
He decided to call new legislative elections that were held in May of the following year, with the aim of relaunching the social and economic policies of his prime minister, Alain Juppé. However, the results obtained in the first round of the same led the latter to present his resignation as a candidate for said position. The second round of those elections, held on June 1, spelled a disastrous defeat for the right-wing coalition and left Chirac in a difficult situation, forced to "cohabit" with the victor, the socialist Lionel Jospin.
His attitude in the international crisis of February 1998, contrary to the US attack on Iraq promoted by the US government of Bill Clinton as punishment for the Iraqi refusal to inspect its chemical and biological arsenal, facilitated the final resolution of the same. On February 22, the Secretary General of the United Nations Organization, Kofi Annan, reached an agreement with Saddam Hussein, whereby he promised to comply with the decisions of said body, which prevented the outbreak of the conflict after Clinton accepted the scope of the agreement. Chirac argued that a military action against a member state of that body could not be accepted without permission from the UN.
Second term (2002-2007)
Again presidential candidate in the elections held in 2002, in the first round, on April 21, his name was the most voted for at the polls, although he only obtained 19.6% of the votes, followed by Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front who received 17.07% of the vote. The fear generated in the country by Le Pen's program led all formations of the left, center and moderate right to request the vote for Chirac, who on May 5 achieved just over 82% of the votes and was re-elected president of the Republic, starting his second term on May 16 of this year.
On Monday, May 6, 2002, he appointed Liberal Jean-Pierre Raffarin (belonging to the center-right Liberal Democracy party) Prime Minister to replace Jospin, who had resigned after his failure in the first round, and 24 hours later he formed a government made up basically of neo-Gaullists, which put an end to the period of 'cohabitation'.
In the month of June, legislative elections were held, where the so-called Union for a Popular Movement or UMP (coalition formed by its RPR and Liberal Democracy) obtained 357 seats and, therefore, an absolute majority in the new National Assembly. Given these results, Chirac agreed to a new executive with Raffarin, who was confirmed as prime minister. On July 14 of that same year, after all these electoral events, Chirac was the target of a frustrated attempt on his person by Maxime Brunerie, a militant of an ultra-rightist group, who shot him during the parade that took place in Paris on the occasion of of the French national holiday.
In 2003, Chirac became the main figure in opposition to the invasion of Iraq by an international coalition led by the United States. The situation degenerates to take both governments to the lowest point in their bilateral relations. Thanks to this action, Chirac was considered a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize that year.
On Tuesday, May 31, 2005, he appointed Dominique de Villepin as prime minister, replacing Raffarin. In addition, the neo-Gaulist power refuses to respond to the crisis of the fifth-republican regime, which calls for urgent and profound constitutional measures".
Jacques Chirac was spied on by the NSA in 2006. However, he had already been spied on by American agencies in the past, when he was prime minister under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. After renouncing to run for a new term, Chirac was succeeded by Nicolas Sarkozy, winner of the 2007 presidential election.
European Union
During Chirac's first term, the European economic and monetary union came to fruition. As a member of the European Council, he participated in the summit that brought together the main leaders of the European Union (EU) in Brussels in 1998 and approved the final list of the eleven countries that would make up the vanguard group of the recently created single European currency, France. among them.
On December 9, 1996, he secretly signed a military agreement with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, which involved coordination between the armies of the two countries within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Together with Gerhard Schröder, Kohl's successor in the Foreign Ministry, Chirac reaffirmed the Franco-German axis, in which the two leaders shared the main positions regarding international politics, particularly with regard to the EU and opposition to the Invasion. from Iraq.
The Treaty of Nice concluded by the Council of the European Union chaired by Chirac in December 2000 to modify the treaties in force, entered into force in 2003 after being ratified by the fifteen Member States. Its primary purpose was to reform the institutional structure to face the enlargement of the European Union, a task that should have been carried out by the Intergovernmental Conference of the Treaty of Amsterdam, which, however, could not be resolved on almost any point.
Germany had demanded to have more weight in the vote because of its larger population, which was opposed by France, which insisted that the traditional parity between France and Germany be maintained.
The Treaty of Nice had not dealt with the basic issue of institutional reform, as the institutions of the European Union were still too complex, so it was agreed in Nice to establish the European Convention that would lead to an Intergovernmental Conference in 2004.
In the spring of 2005, Chirac called a referendum on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe proposed by the conference. The result was a No victory with 55% of voters against and a turnout of 69%.
After Activity
On November 21, 2007, he was indicted for diverting funds to members of his party during his tenure as mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995. He was already interrogated on the matter in July 2007, shortly after leaving the Presidency of the Republic, in one of the indictments opened in 2002.
In December 2011, the Paris Correctional Court sentenced Chirac to two years in prison for embezzlement of public funds in the fictitious hiring of officials in the Parisian city hall between 1990 and 1995, a sentence that he did not serve.
He passed away on September 26, 2019 at his home in Paris.
Awards
- Necklace of the Order of Elizabeth the Catholic (1999)
- Necklace of the Order of Charles III (2006)