Regards, Ivan
Posted on 8/20/2004, 9:38:47 PM by MadIvan
Authority seems to be slipping from Jacques Chirac as he is undone by arrogance while young pretender eyes his crown
IRREVERENT ministers have taken to giggling behind Jacques Chirac’s back at Cabinet meetings in the Elysée Palace. In Brussels, European Union leaders roll their eyes when the French President takes the floor. Aged 71 and in his 10th year in office, M Chirac may hold Europe’s most powerful executive post, but he no longer commands the respect he did.
M Chirac sees himself as the elder statesman of the Western world, but his hopes of securing a favourable place in history after a very bumpy decade are growing increasingly dim as his authority seems to be slipping from his grasp at home and abroad.
M Chirac entered the new political year in France this week fighting a rebellion from within his unpopular Government and struggling to retain his authority in the twilight years of his long presidency.
With 33 months left in office, the tall and physically imposing leader is close to losing control for the first time in the party that he built as his own vehicle in 1976.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the diminutive Finance Minister and dynamic young star of the Government, is expected to defy his boss by announcing his bid next week for the leadership of the Union for a Popular Movement, the latest name for M Chirac’s neo-Gaullist machine. M Chirac, who has betaen all party rivals since he helped to scupper the presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing 25 years ago, is on the verge of being outmanoeuvred by the 49-year-old pretender to his throne.
On the higher plane of international statesmanship, the domain in which M Chirac prides himself, his Gaullist-inspired drive to reinstate la grandeur de la France has backfired. The glory he earned in 2003 by leading opposition to United States over Iraq has faded fast as France has come to realise that M Chirac’s heavy-handed methods have sidelined it in the EU and hobbled its influence worldwide.
Paris is still paying a heavy diplomatic price for M Chirac’s crusade against President Bush at the United Nations before the Iraq war. Closer to home, when France landed only the second-rank transport portfolio in the new EU Commission this month, the opposition blamed M Chirac’s arrogance.
“The France of Jacques Chirac is being punished as a result of treating our partners with disdain, humiliating them sometimes with brutality, and treating the Commission in cavalier fashion,” said Pierre Moscovici, Minister for Europe in the last Socialist government.
M Chirac has repeatedly irked his European partners with his strong-arm tactics, notably when he bludgeoned them into consensus over a botched new treaty at the EU’s summit in Nice in 2000.
He drew swords with Tony Blair in late 2002, accusing the Prime Minister of behaving like a badly brought-up child. He clashed again with Mr Blair this spring, losing his temper over Britain’s refusal to accept Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian Prime Minister, as President of the EU Commission. He infuriated Poland and the other “new Europe” member states last year when he berated them for supporting the US invasion of Iraq, saying that they had “missed an opportunity to shut up”.
Even Europe, once a consensual subject in France, may blow up the end of the Chirac reign. The Socialists are pondering whether to support M Chirac in his promised referendum late next year on the new EU Constitution. Many on the Left see the Constitution as a sell-out of the Gallic ideal to the British-led vision of the EU as a free-trade zone.
Opposition to the treaty from the Left and the anti-federalist Right could puncture M Chirac’s hope of riding into the sunset in 2007 with a triumphant plebiscite. Conversely, a “no” would batter France’s already shaky standing within the EU.
When it comes to domestic legacy, M Chirac has fallen far short of his pledges to revamp France’s centralised state, heal its “social fracture” and equip it for competition in the modern world.
For most of his first seven-year term, he was forced into a back seat as Lionel Jospin’s Socialists pulled France in the other direction with market-unfriendly laws such as the 35-hour maximum working week. Since M Chirac’s 2002 re-election, the UMP Government of Jean-Pierre Raffarin has enacted timid reforms to state pensions and healthcare, but M Chirac has backed away from anything radical in the face of France’s cantankerous mood. Public resentment of reform led to the rout of the UMP in regional and European elections this year.
M Raffarin has been relegated to rock-bottom in public opinion. He has lost credibility with his party and may be replaced this autumn. Yet the Prime Minister is still playing the role of shield for the President.
M Chirac remains moderately popular, with a 48 per cent rating of public trust, despite his meagre record and his failure to restore faith in politics after his traumatic presidential run-off in 2002 against Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right leader.
Perhaps it is simply that the politician who entered the Cabinet in 1967 and became Prime Minister in 1974, has been around so long that the French have come to see him, like the Eiffel Tower, as part of the landscape. Jean-Marc Lech, a pollster, says that France views M Chirac as a likeable, average bloke. He changes his mind a lot but so do the French. France does not hold against M Chirac the long and so far inconclusive saga of corruption inquiries that so fascinate the outside world. “The French do not see themselves as particularly honest,” said M Lech.
Senior figures in M Chirac’s own party believe that there was an obvious way of shoring up the Government, the party and his own standing, but he was too stubborn to consider it. He should have appointed M Sarkozy as Prime Minister and let him lead the UMP as the centre-right’s candidate for president in 2007.
“That would be an elegant solution and avert the war of succession, but Chirac just cannot stomach the idea of not controlling everything,” a government minister told The Times.
Instead, M Chirac has chosen to shoot it out with his younger rival. France is agog over the looming showdown. M Sarkozy is expected to win the UMP leadership in November and defy M Chirac to sack him as minister.
M Sarkozy, a politician more in the Anglo-American mold, has spent the summer promoting himself while M Chirac has been barely visible. The President left for a secluded Indian Ocean holiday after showing his weakness by using half of his July Bastille Day television appearance to attack his minister. He would never allow M Sarkozy to stay in Government if he became party leader, he vowed.
M Sarkozy has yet to declare his formal candidacy to succeed Alain Juppé, the Chirac lieutenant who was forced to resign after a conviction for corruption. However he has been waging a guerrilla war against the head of state that is astonishing by the decorous norms of French political life. In July, he responded to the Bastille Day attack with a cover feature in Paris Match in which he said that he was unmoved by the President’s words. This week he told a party gathering at Arcachon, on the Atlantic coast, that the “UMP should not be the party of a single man”. He said: “I will make it a great political organisation.”
M Sarkozy’s supporters — a majority of party officials — hope that M Chirac backs down to avoid turning his minister into a martyr.
The duel between the old monarch and the younger baron is especially piquant because M Sarkozy so resembles the young Chirac in his energy and all-devouring ambition. The President considers “Sarko” a traitor who abandoned him in 1995 when he threw his weight behind a rival for the presidency and also jilted his daughter Claude, to whom he was once close.
M Sarkozy likes to muse on his similarity to the politician who used to be known as “the bulldozer”. “I resemble him in the electricity of our contact with the crowd. And, like him in his day, I am the one who has the most desire (for power),” M Sarkozy said recently.
Many supporters are worried about M Chirac’s strategy. Some see him playing King Lear, sitting in the Elysée, advised by Claude and old cronies and increasingly remote from the country’s mood. “Jacques Chirac is slipping gradually into the isolation of power,” le Monde said this spring.
Unable to bear rivalry, M Chirac has failed to groom a plausible dauphin, say insiders. M Juppé, his chosen successor, has, with his conviction for corruption, paid for the sins of the Chirac party machine and M Raffarin has failed as a potential successor.
Some, however, say that his blood is up and they see him reverting to his old form in the face of adversity. M Chirac, who excels at winning campaigns but not holding power, appears intent on a last political hurrah: the elimination of “that upstart”, as he calls M Sarkozy.
He may attempt to promote Dominique de Villepin, his protégé and Interior Minister, as a successor. Unfortunately M de Villepin, although brilliant and flamboyant and a former Foreign Minister, is impetuous, has never held elected office and enjoys little party support.
Just conceivably, in order to thwart “le petit Nicolas”, M Chirac may decide to seek a third term. Some in the Chirac camp acknowledge that the old man cannot imagine giving up the life of high office.
“The state is his only home. Outside its walls, he would be a ghost,” said a colleague.
CHIRAC'S PATH TO THE TOP
# 1932 Only child born to wealthy banker in Paris
# 1954 Graduates in political science from Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris
# 1956 Drafted into army and fights in Algeria
# 1959 Enters civil service and becomes Prime Minister Georges Pompidou’s right-hand man
# 1967 Enters National Assembly
# 1972 Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development
# 1974 Appointed Prime Minister by President Giscard d’Estaing in cohabitation government
# 1976 Resigns and forms conservative Rally of the Republic party
# 1977-95 Mayor of Paris
# 1995 Elected president
# 1997 Dissolves parliament to push through economic reform but loses parliamentary majority; cohabitation government
# 2002 Wins landslide victory in run-off presidential elections against Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front leader
# Survives assassination attempt on Bastille Day
# 2003 Leads opposition against US-led war in Iraq
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
Once he leaves office, he can be indicted for financial improprieties, isnt that right? Im looking forward to that day.
Oh...Nevermind...I thought this was about Kerry.
Change of regime in France! Without firing a shot...!!!!! ;-)
Ridicule is death to a Frenchman.
Posers - we've been laughing at him and ridiculing him for years! :)
Just ask John Kerry...
I think there is an important item left off his biographical timeline, though:
1977-1995.....Poodle of young Pan-Arab Socialist leader, Saddam Hussein, who bankrolled his campaigns.
Wow, do ya have a source for that? I had heard rumours to that effect, but I would greatly appreciate a source to show to some friends...
I've never seen a source for that claim, but there was a letter Chirac wrote to Saddam in 1987 promising to help him rebuild his nuclear reactors.
No, it's just a normal French-styled article about Parisian boy-bickering, hardly worthy of any great note.
Call me when Chirac is held to account for his bribes (carrier De Gaulle, anyone?!), illicit lovers, murder (Rainbow Warrior, anyone?!), and backstabbing...because the effeminate French themselves would have to lead the charge on those crimes.
On the Oil for Food scandal in Iraq, however, and possibly for illegal technology transfers to rogue nations, he may very well be held accountable by *other* nations...nations that still have a Rule of Law.
5 Legislative Days Left Until The AWB Expires
all frogs are ugly and they all look the same to me. All they will do is trade an old warn out jackass for a younger one.
Looks like, in the absence of Saddams billions to hand out as political favors, Chirac's stock has fallen through the floor. Like Clinton, Chirac will in time reap the legacy of his corruption, which is his due. And in the end, he will be vilified throughout history, as it should be.
During the run up to Gulf War II there were tons of pics posted of Chirac and Saddam at the French built nuclear reactor.
Y'know, it is simply impossible to hate the French too much.
Advise the French Weasel should have followed himself.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.