GLOOM CASTS A SHADOW ON CHIRAC'S PRESIDENCY
By John Thornhill

Financial Times (UK)
November 29, 2005

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d7bd42d2-6127-11da-9b07-0000779e2340.html

Jacques Chirac, France's president, received as many political brickbats as personal bouquets on Tuesday as he celebrated his 73rd birthday amid a gloomy mood of national introspection.

As Mr. Chirac's allies wished him continuing "audacity" for the remaining 17 months of his presidential term, his opponents condemned him for having presided over a "lost decade."

Laurent Fabius, the Socialist former prime minister, said that Mr. Chirac had wasted his 10 years in office. "We have lost a lot of time because on all the dossiers that look to the future . . . on education, social cohesion, research, and technological preparedness, France has not advanced, she has gone into reverse," he said.

This has undoubtedly been an annus horribilis for the French president. In May Mr. Chirac lost a referendum he had called to approve the European Union's constitutional treaty forcing him to sack Jean-Pierre Raffarin as prime minister and bring Nicolas Sarkozy, his popular arch-antagonist, back into the government as interior minister.

A few weeks later, London beat Paris, the favorite among odds-makers, to the rights to host the 2012 Olympic games in spite of Mr. Chirac's last-minute glad-handing in Singapore.

In September Mr. Chirac was rushed to hospital after suffering a "vascular accident" affecting his eyesight. In late October urban riots erupted across France, highlighting how little progress had been made in healing the "social fracture" that Mr. Chirac had promised to cure during his 1995 presidential campaign.

A year ago, Mr. Chirac's supporters were hinting that the French president might run for an unprecedented third term of office in 2007. This year, their protestations that "everything is possible" sound increasingly hollow as Dominique de Villepin, prime minister, and Mr. Sarkozy have in effect already launched their rival campaigns to succeed him.

An opinion poll published in Le Parisien newspaper on Sunday showed that 72 per cent of respondents thought that Mr. Chirac now exercised only a weak influence over events in France as power had seeped to the prime minister's office. "The disappointment is strong," said Roland Cayrol, director of the CSA institute that conducted the poll. "People tell us that Chirac has made a good diagnostic of the ills of French society but that, 10 years after his first election, nothing has changed."

Nicolas Baverez, a noted acerbic commentator, recently summed up France's dilemma in Les Echos newspaper: "In view of a president who combines moral bankruptcy, absence of legitimacy, and a physical incapacity to perform his functions, a government in which rival ambitions and divergent political lines cohabit with each other, and a divided opposition that is absent from the public debate, there is a considerable risk of seeing the country abandon itself to the protectionist, nationalist, xenophobic, and extremist passions that torment it."

Some politicians have even gone so far as to predict that France's political malaise could signal the end of the Fifth Republic's "monarchical" presidency adopted by Charles de Gaulle and carried on by Mr. Chirac.

Pierre Giacometti, research director at Ipsos, the polling organisation, says that Mr. Sarkozy, the current frontrunner to succeed Mr. Chirac, has helped revolutionize French politics by speeding up its rhythm and by aiming to set a daily news agenda. He has also changed the language of political discourse by using everyday French.

"In a certain way the president of the republic -- Chirac and Mitterrand -- and their prime ministers over the past 20 years have pursued a policy in the media of appearing as little as possible to ensure their interventions were all the more eagerly awaited. The idea was to 'sacralize' the appearanes of a monarchical president," he said. "Sarkozy has adopted the inverse strategy of being omnipresent in the media and developing a strategy of 'I listen, I explain, I act.'"

It is a strategy that other presidential contenders, including Mr. de Villepin, are now desperately trying to mimic as they aim to re-engage voters dissaffected during Mr. Chirac's reign.