The French President: Jacques Chirac, socialist

A veteran Gaullist politician, Jacques Chirac has in office turned into one of Europe's most left-wing leaders

WHEN France's president, Jacques Chirac, dropped in recently on José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain's Socialist prime minister, his host paid him a rather unusual compliment. “Some people may well wonder,” said Mr Zapatero, “whether Jacques Chirac really is a leader of the centre-right, compared with others that we know.” In recent months, the pair seem to have become inseparable, meeting for summits and congratulating each other on their shared vision. To many outside France, it might seem odd that Europe's longest-serving conservative leader is so keen to identify closely with a Spanish Socialist. Yet Mr Chirac's fondness for his new Spanish friend should perhaps not be that much of a surprise. For Mr Chirac himself is these days one of the most left-wing of Europe's leaders.

Consider Mr Chirac's credentials as a champion of the left. His recent proposal to create an “international solidarity levy” on international financial transactions or airline-ticket sales, so as to finance African development and the fight against AIDS, won him the acclaim of the third-world lobby. “Development is both the greatest challenge and the greatest urgency of our time,” he declared in a speech broadcast at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, calling Africa's poverty “morally unacceptable”. Mr Chirac is also a certified ecolo (green), having got his cherished environmental charter enshrined in France's constitution last month. This puts the right to live in a healthy environment on the same legal footing in France as human rights, setting the country up as a pioneer in environmental protection - and Mr Chirac as potential saviour of the planet.

The French president has no rivals as global spokesman on anti-Americanism, a doctrine that usually belongs to the left in Europe but in France has a long history on the Gaullist right as well. To this, he has added his own blend of anti-globalisation, globe-trotting with the likes of Brazil's President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, a former trade-union leader, and dispatching representatives to the World Social Forum. Moreover, with his Arabist foreign policy in the Middle East, and his defiant hostility to the war in Iraq, he seems to have a soft-left world outlook that would fit well on any university campus.

On economic matters, this is certainly no market-liberalising, right-wing government. In May, Mr Chirac will celebrate ten years in office. It is hard to detect what mark his decade has left. Admittedly, he shared five years (1997-2002) with a Socialist government, which introduced such policies as the 35-hour week. But even this is not something that Mr Chirac's present centre-right government, under Jean-Pierre Raffarin, has been in any rush to dismantle: its reforms have loosened the rules, not overturned them.

Mr Chirac has contined to resist EU efforts to liberalise the energy market. He is now blocking the services directive, which he said this week was “unacceptable” and should be “picked apart”. He has even reactivated an interventionist industrial policy. And he has a high spender's tendency to throw money at political problems, especially ones that spill out on to the street - one reason why France's budget deficit has widened sharply.

Only this week, Mr Chirac's government was busy yet again caving in to demands for public-sector pay rises after 600,000-1m protesters took to the streets. Having stood firm for a full three days, it promised to reopen wage talks, and did not rule out another increase in the minimum wage, after a rise of 5.8% last year. Even the left-leaning Liberation could scarcely believe it: “The volte-face of the government, which is today proposing to open the coffers which it swore yesterday were empty, will prove right all the numerous unionists who believe that there is no point in discussing coolly and that social dialogue is a sham unless they turn up at the negotiating table with a loaded gun.”

Mr Chirac has not strayed entirely from centre-right territory. He campaigned for election in 2002 with a promise to cut income tax by a third, and this is still official policy. Yet the combined efforts of four successive finance ministers have secured only a modest 10% reduction. He is pressing ahead with privatisation too: his latest finance minister, Thierry Breton, has confirmed that Electricite de France and Gaz de France are being prepared for sale. But the right hardly has a monopoly on privatisation, a policy embraced in some ways just as fervently by the former Socialist government.

What does all this add up to? “Compared with the rest of the European right - Berlusconi, Merkel, Aznar - he is certainly different,” comments a leading French Socialist. “They are all both more liberal and more Atlanticist.” Mr Chirac's economic policy certainly puts him to the left of Britain's Tony Blair. Even Germany's Gerhard Schroder has done more to deregulate the labour market and reform welfare than Mr Chirac. His new chum, Mr Zapatero, is arguably his closest ideological ally now.

One explanation for Mr Chirac's embrace of a soft-left, statist, instinctively anti-capitalist creed could be that he is playing Mr Blair's post-ideological game of stealing the opposition's clothes ahead of the 2007 presidential election. A French presidential candidate needs broad electoral appeal in the run-off, and the country's political centre of gravity lies well to the left of Britain's, say.

Another explanation is that his variety of continental conservatism belongs to a social Gaullist tradition, which - like Christian Democracy - often defines itself precisely against liberalism. Under this doctrine, the language of “social cohesion” and “solidarity” belongs to the right as much as to the left. In other words, Mr Chirac has not been liberalising simply because, as one adviser says, “he does not believe in untempered liberalism”.

Yet this may be to lend more coherence to Mr Chirac's policies than they deserve. More plausibly, exactly 40 years since he was first elected to public office, he is guided less by conviction than by a desire to keep the social peace and avoid confrontation. As prime minister in the late-1980s, Mr Chirac was seen as an energetic reformer. Age and power have tempered such zeal; consensus now matters more than change. At the EU summit next week to consider economic reforms, France will again be in the rearguard, not the vanguard. Despite GDP growth of only 2-2.5% this year, and unemployment of 10%, Mr Chirac's advisers argue that not much in the French model needs radical change. Try telling that to the jobless.

A veteran Gaullist politician, Jacques Chirac has in office turned into one of Europe's most left-wing leaders.

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