PARIS — Jacques Chirac’s passing marks the end of an old kind of French politics.
The former French president, who died Thursday, was one of the last big beasts of a political era — one that, though it may have been corrupt to its core, was nonetheless mysteriously closer to the people than those of the self-regarding and technocratic politicians who followed.
If Chirac neglected, and maybe worsened, many of France’s domestic woes, he’ll nevertheless be remembered kindly — more kindly, no doubt, than he deserves.
He was a retail, street-corner politician in a mass media age. No matter who you might be — angry farmer, cynical journalist, president of an African nation — Chirac could convince you, in five seconds or five minutes, that you had his sole, undivided attention. To meet Chirac was to adore Chirac. It was a great talent that he abused for four decades.
The great statesman spent 25 frenetic years plotting against enemies, backstabbing his friends and zig-zagging on policy and principle to reach the summit of the French political system. He spent 12 lazy and confused years as president of the Republic, achieving little at a time when the French economy was wandering off track.
Rather than any fixed principles, Chirac was motivated by his own advancement.
As president, Chirac toyed for a few months with radical reform, retreated, called an unnecessary parliamentary election and lost. He spent a mostly idle four years with a Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, running the country. His second term — won in 2002 after going up against far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen — was a time of drift, indecision, rebellion in the multiracial banlieues and a lost referendum on an EU constitution he scarcely defended.
He made and re made the French center right several times in his own selfish interest. He bequeathed to the nation a corrupt and internally divided party, the UMP, later Les Républicains, which imploded within a few years.
Despite a mostly idle presidency, some of his actions do deserve praise. There was, of course, his stand against the American-British invasion of Iraq in 2003. His resistance to pressure to join was not just wise but courageous. Accused of being a cowardly “surrender monkey” and a client of Saddam Hussein, 16 years later his arguments appear better-founded than those of the then U.S. President George W. Bush and then British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Chirac also deserves credit for having resisted racism through most of his political career and for resisting any kind of rapprochement with Le Pen’s xenophobic National Front. He was also the president to have the courage to recognize — and apologize for — the role the French state played in the persecution of Jews during World War II.
He can also credibly claim to have saved the lives of tens of thousands of his fellow citizens by being the first French leader to insist, in 2002, that the country’s road traffic laws be enforced properly. The effect on road deaths was dramatic.
Chirac also deserves credit for having resisted racism through most of his political career | Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
But ultimately, it’s fair to say Chirac was interested in just one thing: power.
Rather than any fixed principles, Chirac was motivated by his own advancement. His career was a bewildering pattern of political zig-zags, from far-left student to anti-Gaullist to virulent Euroskeptic and finally European visionary, whose rallies were flooded with blue and yellow flags. The Thatcherite, anti-state, pro-market, privatizing prime minister of 1986-1988 mutated into a presidential candidate with a social conscience, who fervently campaigned against the euro, unemployment and “social fracture” in 1995, then went on to embrace the euro and a strong franc, but did nothing for social fracture and dithered as unemployment boomed.
Chirac was the symbol, and greatest practitioner, of that classic form of French politics — clientelist but close to the people, fundamentally anti-democratic but respectful of core French obsessions and the country’s self-image.
His tragedy is that he came to power at a time when those old themes and approaches no longer served France’s needs and could not help adjust an over-centralized country to the new European and global economic realities.
In retirement and illness, Chirac — who was as detested as any French president while in office — came to be regarded as a rascally great uncle, a man whose faults were mostly endearing and who had stood up to Washington in 2003, at least.
Nostalgia for a lost era in French life has tinted his legacy. France may be mourning the loss of a formidable statesman and an emblem of French politics. But the French also know they are better off moving on from his disarming, yet destructive, brand of politics.
John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.