Chirac Says Goodbye

It wasn’t tearful, but it was solemn and moving. And, typically, it left a lot of unanswered questions about his succession.

Finally, however, after 12 years as President of the French Republic, and months of coy “maybe I will and maybe I won’t” responses, Jacques Chirac announced officially, March 11, in a nationwide television broadcast to the French people, that he would not seek a new mandate in the upcoming two-tier French presidential elections scheduled for April 22 and May 6.

The formal confirmation by the French leader, whose strong and public condemnation of President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq made him a virtual hero in France, Europe and, indeed, much of the world, was long in coming but also long expected. 

He is, after all, 74 years old. He suffered a mild cerebral attack not quite two years ago. His political career already has lasted for 40 years. His presidential and indeed his political record is highly controversial with many accomplishments but many unfulfilled promises.

Despite a deserved reputation as the kind of people-friendly person everyone would like to have to dinner or share a beer with, his governing history is such that scarcely two percent of the French public, according to opinion polls, wanted him to run again. 

Above all, he lacks an absolutely necessary electoral machine because his political party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), is in the hands of another ambitious presidential hopeful, UMP president and current Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Actually, Chirac’s five-year term of office won’t end officially for another two months on May 13. However, less than a week after his broadcast date, Chirac was facing a formal March 16 deadline for announcing new presidential candidacies.  Past that day, without a formal declaration of his intent to run, he would have been ineligible anyway.

In effect, he stretched the doubts about his intentions virtually as far as they could go and then, just short of the deadline, when he finally bowed out as potential contender, he did so with his focus far more on the future than on the past.

In a lengthy exhortation to his fellow citizens to have confidence in the nation’s and their personal abilities to deal with a changing world, he assured them he would serve them “in another way” after he steps down and that he would continue what he stressed had been his life of service to the cause of peace and the preservation of France’s stature as a major world power.

His carefully worded announcement in no way diminished his oft-stated determination to see his mandate to its end in full exercise of his powers.

In fact, to erase any chance of a lame duck image, he has, for months, been engaged in a whirlwind of presidential visits and initiatives, including high-profile engagement in international conferences on Lebanon, the environment and Franco-African development.

On the home front he rammed through consecration of long-awaited French constitutional amendments, of new laws guaranteeing public housing for the needy and improved retirement care for soldiers from the former French colonies who served France courageously in her hours of need during World War II.  They long had been given substandard recognition and recompense.

Chirac still has some international visits on his remaining presidential agenda, in particular a Berlin summit at the end of March to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the formation of the European Union (EU.)

What may concern him even more, however, is the tempestuous and still unpredictable political campaign underway in France involving more than half a dozen contenders for his now soon-to-be vacated presidential office.

Despite widely different political orientations, at least three of them –including Sarkozy — are now in neck to neck contention for the job and a fourth, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is nominally trailing but always unpredictable.

To general surprise, Le Pen, a symbol of the far right in French politics, wound up as one of the two survivors in the first round of the last presidential election in 2002.

Subsequently, he was crushed by Chirac in the runoff and stands little real chance of repeating his 2002 first round exploit.  Although he is close to the magic number, if he fails to meet the required candidacy requirement of 500 support signatures from local mayors or other elected officials by March 16, he may not even be a presidential contender this year. His supporters, however, have the possibility of influencing a decision in favor of one or another of the two finalists depending on to whom they swing their votes.

Up until recently the presidential race was dominated by Sarkozy to the right of center and Socialist party candidate Sègolene Royal to the left with opinion polls varying daily but essentially putting the two or them well in front of the pack.

Since the beginning of March, however, a third candidate, François Bayrou, President of the centralist Union for French Democracy party, normally a non-contender, has surged forward in the opinion polls to become a serious threat to both Sarkozy and Royal.

A former Education Minister, Bayrou’s campaign has been based largely on the thesis that France needs to break away from the monopolistic dominance and alternance of the bitterly opposed UMP party on the right and Socialist party on the left.   One or the other of those political groupings has dominated French politics for the last half century and Bayrou’s appeal is largely based on widespread distrust or dislike, for differing reasons, of both Sarkozy and Royal. The former, despite admitted experience and technical competence, is often viewed as potentially too authoritarian and big-business oriented, while the latter has had trouble, even within her own party, establishing the image of someone substantively qualified to handle the demands of the nation’s highest office.

Although Sarkozy and Chirac belong to the same political family and have worked together lengthily if often testily over the years, Chirac pointedly refrained in his step-down address from any signal of support for Sarkozy in the presidential sweepstakes.

He said he would make his preferences known later without specifying when or for whom, although he is expected to name his choice just after the final list of declared candidates is officially announced on March 19.

Logically he should come down in favor of Sarkozy, although there is no guarantee. Their long joint political history is too fraught with periodic arguments and opposition for that. And Chirac’s blessing in any event would be a mixed one.

Sarkozy has based his campaign to date on his pledge to rupture with the old—read Chirac-style—way of doing things and he has been at pains to stress their different outlooks and styles and avoid the image of being Chirac’s anointed successor.

That is just the charge that Royal and her Socialist party team levels at him every chance they get. Their argument is that Chirac has been a disastrous president. The last thing the country needs, they insist, is to endorse five more years of the same-type of policies under someone so closely, even if tempestuously associated with the outgoing President.

Chirac’s legacy already is being debated mightily and probably will be endlessly long after the election is over. That is in large measure because throughout an impressive 40-year political career he has proven himself to be, above all, an instinctive politician ready to shift directions, assume contradictory stances and make unfulfillable promises depending on the prevailing political winds. 

Despite his time-enhanced stature as a senior world leader, he has acted less in the role of an internationalist than in that of his most illustrious predecessor, President Charles de Gaulle, as a defender, above all, of French influence and glory.

He will leave his successor, however, a country which, despite its illustrious history, and economic know-how, is massively in debt, full of social strife, fearful of the inroads of ever increasing globalization on the French way of life and bitterly divided about the way forward.

He also leaves a France which lost much of its stature and influence on the European and world scene two years ago when despite Chirac’s support for it,  the French rejected by national referendum a proposed new European constitutional treaty. That effectively halted, at least temporarily, the European Union’s ’s march toward greater economic and political unity.

At an EU summit in Brussels just before his farewell announcement he publicly apologized to the organization for perhaps not doing all that he could have done to assure a positive French vote on the constitution. 

That apology was needed because, during his presidential tenure, despite his constant declarations of support for a united and vigorous Europe, largely as a counterweight to American influence; Chirac systematically laid the blame for many of France’s problems on the rigidity of  EU bureaucrats and regulations. Small wonder that the French subsequently voted against the EU’s proposed new constitution.  

Despite his shortcomings, no one will be able to take from him, however, his genuine accomplishments. 

His opposition to the Iraq war, justified over time but so badly handled that it engendered strong anti-French feelings in America, certainly ranks foremost.

While since that time there has been little love lost between him and U.S. President George W. Bush, it should not be forgotten that Chirac, in a classic demonstration of his intensely human side, was the first foreign leader to come to the United States as a sign of support after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

He also was the President who forced his country to come to terms with long glossed-over unpleasant parts of its history,  particularly its complicity in the extermination of Jews during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II.

He was the one who ended obligatory military service, who brought France into the Euro currency zone, who vigorously and successfully fought off constant European Union attempts to cut down its subsidies to French agriculture, who has campaigned, even if often more verbally than concretely, for aid to developing countries, for environmental protection, for adherence to France’s official separation between church and state and for vigorous efforts to combat any evidence of racial and religious discrimination in the nation.

Just who, among the contenders, will have to assume Chirac’s legacy probably won’t be known until at least the first round of the electoral process on April 22 and maybe not until the second round finishes May 6. 

With the polls fluctuating wildly and the candidates criss-crossing the country and dominating the television and radio interview programs, the decision may go right down to the wire.

One thing is certain already, however.  Love him or hate him, Chirac will be a hard act to follow or forget.