Every day in the kitchen of the Elysée Palace the staff who prepare luncheon for French President Jacques Chirac face an immutable deadline. At 12.15 on the dot, they are aware, Chirac will sit down for dejeuner and expect it to be ready. It is an insistence on regularity that clashes with his reputation for a lack of consistency. Not for nothing has he been dubbed la girouette — the weathervane.
It is a reputation that has hardly been enhanced over the last few weeks as Chirac has struggled to offer a coherent leadership to the Yes campaign to ratify the mammoth new European constitution in a referendum to be held next Sunday — a performance that, at times, has barely risen above lackluster.
A case in point was the 72-year-old president’s belated television intervention in the debate a little over a month ago, when he appeared in the studio of TF1 with 80 young people to explain why they should vote Oui.
With polling once again sliding away from the Yes campaign, his cross examination was supposed to show another side of Chirac — in touch with a younger generation of voters who he had failed to reach in the 2002 presidential elections. Gifted with a splintered opposition urging a No vote from across the political spectrum — from the far right’s defense of France’s sovereignty to the social protectionism of the left — it should have been easy to divide and conquer.
Instead it was a curious affair, with Chirac’s interrogation being moderated not by heavyweight political commentators but by French celebrities. And far from convincing a skeptical France, Chirac appeared ill at ease as he struggled to explain why France should vote Yes. When his young audience described their fears for the future, all Chirac could muster was: “I do not understand.” In the view of the left-wing Liberation, he appeared to patronize not only his audience but the people of France, telling them not to worry and leave it to his better judgment.
In a country where he has been parodied as le super-menteur — the “superliar”, complete with cloak, mask and tights — it was not the best conceived appeal. If the Yes camp had counted on Chirac to win the argument, it was a misplaced hope.
It is not the French media that has been unkind about Chirac’s leadership over the referendum in comparison with the young pretender who would have his job, former Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, now leader of Chirac’s center-right UMP. In recent weeks, Chirac-bashing has become an international sport. He was described as “Europe’s dinosaur” on the cover of Newsweek.
All this is a far cry from two years ago when Chirac was riding high in French — if not US and British — opinion for his opposition to the war in Iraq. For a while this silenced the doubts that have dogged him since his years as mayor of Paris when he was accused by a former aide of taking kickbacks. Now the referendum campaign has cruelly exposed Chirac’s most serious weaknesses. And as he celebrates 10 years in the the highest office, the vote marks a critical moment.
The passage of the constitution is vital to the legacy of a president who has failed to make the same mark as his predecessors: The socialist François Mitterrand, and the men who inspired and nurtured the young Chirac, Georges Pompidou and Charles de Gaulle. Increasingly overshadowed by the hyperambitious Sarkozy, who has demonstrated a far surer touch in tackling difficult issues, this may be Chirac’s last chance to retrieve something from his disappointing decade.
It was not supposed to be like this. The well-connected young Chirac, who flirted briefly with communism, always seemed destined for the greatest things. Born in Paris on Nov. 29 1932, he had a domineering father who was a bank clerk and later an executive for an aircraft company. Chirac Père was determined his son should be the best.
First in his class at the Saumur military college, he was wounded in the war to maintain French colonial rule in Algeria. Summer school at Harvard — where he acquired a taste for American fast food — was followed by entry to the Ecole nationale d’administration, nursery for France’s top civil servants.
At Pompidou’s suggestion, he ran for the National Assembly as a Gaullist and enjoyed a series of rapid promotions that culminated in his nomination as prime minister by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing at the age of 41. Although he resigned over differences with Giscard in 1976, by 1977 he had begun his long tenure as mayor of Paris — with his eye on the presidency.
It would be a long wait. He failed in presidential bids in both 1981 and 1988, spending years in the mayor’s office. It was these years that would later be the subject of scrutiny for three different corruption investigations, over kickbacks and a holiday home. With a controversial legacy, and with one last great opportunity to establish his domination of French politics, many are asking why — with his time in office coming to an end — Chirac mounted so late and lame an effort to articulate the benefits of voting Yes.
In his handling of the referendum campaign, Chirac has demonstrated the greatest flaw of his political character — a tendency toward hubris. His first term as president fell apart after just two years when he called a snap parliamentary election in 1997 that left him lumbered with a socialist prime minister for five years.
His decision to launch a French nuclear test weeks into that presidency also smacked of arrogance and destroyed any good will he might have hoped to enjoy. And for all his conviction that the war against Iraq was wrong, Chirac appears to have misjudged the mood in Washington in the wake of 9/11, effectively neutralizing his country’s ability to influence Washington at a crucial juncture.
It was at this time that Chirac let slip his idea of his place in history — as the equal at least of Charles de Gaulle. Asked during a television interview if he ever thought of Gen. de Gaulle as he formulated France’s policy on Iraq, Chirac blushed deeply. “I can only be flattered by your comparison,” he replied. “But I draw inspiration from myself.”
But if history judges his presidency a failure it will not be for his philandering, or for his funding of his party as mayor of Paris. Instead his personal failure may be regarded as a wider failure of French political thinking on the right.
With a week to go until France votes, the question is not whether the Yes campaign can win, but whether Jacques Chirac can seize defeat from the jaws of victory and torpedo a European project his country has done so much to foster. If he loses it will not only consign his last two years to a lame duck presidency, but Europe to chaos.
