Fallen star

Date: 11/06/1998

SOME French television channels simply will not let go.

Weeks after his last international outing, clips of Jacques Chirac clapping his hands - and conspicuously missing the beat - to the tune of All You Need Is Love are still being broadcast.

Alongside the French president, elected three years ago on a stronger wave of popular fervour than any of his predecessors in France's 40-year-old Fifth Republic, were the more rhythmic Tony, Cherie, Bill and Hillary, all clapping in time. The occasion was the Group of Eight industrialised nations' summit in Birmingham.

Before that, Chirac's previous sortie on the international stage was at the Brussels euro-summit at the beginning of May. There, his insistence on a French head for the new European Central Bank delayed and soured what should have been a festive baptism for the single currency.

The Brussels summit earned Chirac no friends. The normally compliant French media, reflecting their frustration with a man who is living up to few of his promises for radical social reform, expressed outrage that Chirac's stance had seriously undermined Chancellor Helmut Kohl, one of France's most loyal allies, just months before difficult parliamentary elections in Germany.

Compounding the irony was the fact that Chirac was promoting Bank of France governor Jean-Claude Trichet, a man for whom he has no personal sympathy.

The left-wing daily Libération, in an editorial headed “Die for Trichet?”, declared that in his campaign in support of the central banker, “Chirac confused national interest and nationalist vanity”.

Recalling Chirac's decision to dissolve the French parliament last year, a miscalculation which led to the defeat of his own Gaullist-Conservative coalition and victory for the left-wing ten months before scheduled elections, Libération claimed the president's lack of support for Kohl had reached the point of “promoting the election of a new Socialist government; this time in Germany”.

Since he dissolved the National Assembly last year, Chirac has seemed incapable of doing anything right. The list of damaging revelations is growing by the day. Following the Brussels summit, his reputation as a gung-ho diplomatic negotiator capable of holding his own on the world stage has taken a knock.

Now he is promising a Franco-German initiative at next week's Cardiff summit. Yet this is likely to be little more than an attempt to repair the damage of the past month and offer scant comfort to an embattled Kohl.

Unlike Margaret Thatcher at her most intransigent in Europe, Chirac has little backing at home. Known as a vacillating Eurosceptic, his conversion to economic and monetary union is seen as opportunist, a device to reassure the voter that he is in the politically-correct pro-European mould fashioned by his two predecessors, the Socialist François Mitterrand and Conservative Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.

In 1992, Chirac hesitated for weeks before deciding to rally the mainstream of his Gaullist RPR party behind the 'yes' campaign on the Maastricht Treaty.

Even during his successful presidential campaign in 1995, he naïvely brandished the threat of a new vote on monetary union until constitutional experts pointed out that the issue had already been covered by the Maastricht referendum.

Over the past year, Chirac has seen his Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin constantly stealing a march, even when it comes to celebrations.

When Chirac marked his third anniversary in the Elysée Palace last month, the Gaullist faithful all over France held paying dinner parties as a mark of solidarity.

Unhappily, they coincided with the première of a new French film Dîner de Cons about dinners at which successful Parisian thirty-somethings with degrees, diplomas and cash vie with each other to find a boring and stupid guest of honour for a smart gathering. Satirists were quick to draw unkind parallels.

The Gaullist celebrations turned out to be somewhat lame, serving merely to underline a period in which the French conservative right seems to have gone into terminal decline, leaving the political battlefield to a democratic left and the menacing extreme-right National Front.

A month later, the Protestant Jospin further accentuated the differences when he chose not to trumpet the achievements of his first year in office. Shunning festivities, Jospin claimed he had work to do.

Over the past few weeks, Chirac's problems have grown on the political front and they have even taken on a legal dimension.

The Gaullists' coalition partners in the Union for French Democracy (UDF) split after regional elections in March, and a dispute over their approach towards forming alliances with the National Front.

Now, the UDF is effectively divided into three, was the result that there are now five forces on the French right, as opposed to three in March. Of them all, only the National Front of Jean-Marie le Pen has any semblance of cohesion and dynamism.

At the same time, there have been repeated suggestions that the president himself may be tainted by the plethora of corruption scandals threatening the RPR.

These relate to a variety of doubtful practices, including charges that during the Eighties some 300 salaries were paid by the Paris ratepayer for people with fictitious posts at the Hôtel de Ville. Chirac was mayor of Paris from 1977 until his election to the presidency.

These phoney Paris officials were really working on behalf of the RPR. The abuse came to light during judicial investigations in which the family of Jean Tiberi, Chirac's Gaullist successor as mayor of Paris, has been under the spotlight.

Jospin quickly stepped in to stop his supporters speculating publicly about Chirac's possible responsibility, the likelihood of his facing charges or an early presidential election.

According to visitors to the Elysée, Chirac appears at a loss as to how to regain the initiative. Some visitors have depicted a touchingly friendly character, with an eye constantly on his television screen in the corner - usually tuned in to Eurosport. “He asked me if I wanted a whisky,” one visitor told a French news magazine. “He was so pleased when I said 'yes' that I understood he was the one who really wanted the whisky.”

Chirac himself, who has met and worked with all of the presidents of the Fifth Republic including its founder, Charles de Gaulle (he was nicknamed 'le bulldozer' by Georges Pompidou for his go-getting style) is said to be most influenced, albeit reluctantly, by the aloof performance of his late rival Mitterrand, whose motto was “let time do its work”.

Chirac's term as president so far has been a tale of growing public disillusionment with a man who, before his election, cultivated his human side and promised caring reforms, with no quarter given to technocrats.

In office, he has largely done the opposite, allowing his first prime minister, the cold Alain Juppé, to batten down the hatches and run the country in a classic managerial style.

Juppé's uninspiring and disdainful approach did not gel with the image of a president who, when he was mayor of Paris, liked to tell stories of how one of his early girlfriends during a term at Harvard drove a pink convertible and called him 'Honeypie'.

In the same breath, he was fond of recounting how, during that same stay in the US, he took a job in a Howard Johnson's fast-food restaurant and earned a reference, signed by Howard Johnson himself, describing the future president of France as “an excellent soda-jerk”.

With four years still to go before the next presidential election and assuming that the scandals threatening him die down, Chirac can always opt for a graceful retirement at the age of 69.

If the Jospin government runs into trouble, however, he might retake the initiative and go for re-election. If so, time will have done its work.

BIO