Jacques Chirac

Jacques Chirac born November 29 1932 in Paris and died September 26 2019 in the same city was a senior French civil servant and statesman He was Prime Minister from 1974 to 1976 then again from 1986 to 1988 and President of the Republic from 1995 to 2007 After studying at the Institut dÉtudes Politiques de Paris and the École Nationale dAdministration ENA he joined the office of Prime Minister Georges Pompidou in 1962 as a special adviser He was elected Member of Parliament for Corrèze within the Gaullist majority and appointed Secretary of State four times and Minister four times starting in 1967 Chirac was subsequently chosen as Prime Minister by Valéry Giscard dEstaing in 1974 Two years later having had poor relations with Giscard he resigned from Prime Ministers office and launched the Rally for the Republic RPR a political party claiming to be Gaullist While continuing his career as an elected official in Corrèze he became Mayor of Paris in 1977 and ran in the 1981 presidential election After the rightwing victory in the 1986 legislative elections he was appointed by Socialist President François Mitterrand to serve as Prime Minister once again He was thus the first head of government under a cohabitation regime under the Fifth Republic and at the same time the only politician to have served as Prime Minister twice under the same regime He was defeated in the second round of the 1988 presidential election by the incumbent president then became leader of the opposition despite subsequently facing the growing popularity of Édouard Balladur In 1995 he was elected Head of State with 526 of the vote in the second round defeating Socialist Lionel Jospin He initially governed with the rightwing majority he acquired in 1993 The beginning of his first term was marked by a pension and social security reform that was massively contested and partially abandoned and by the recognition of the French states responsibility for the persecution and deportation of Jews during the Occupation Following the dissolution of the National Assembly in 1997 he lost his majority in Parliament and was forced into cohabitation with Lionel Jospin during which a referendum was held establishing the fiveyear presidential term Jacques Chirac was thus the last president of the Fifth Republic to have served a sevenyear term In the 2002 presidential election he was reelected for a fiveyear term with 822 of the vote in the second round benefiting from a republican front against the National Front candidate JeanMarie Le Pen During his second term after launching the Union for a Popular Movement UMP he led the international opposition to the Iraq War launched by US President George W Bush in 2003 and campaigned for a yes vote in the 2005 referendum on the European Constitution which resulted in a no victory At the end of his presidency in 2007 faced with low popularity and a succession of electoral defeats and weakened by a stroke in 2005 he decided not to seek a third term On June 9 2008 the Chirac Foundation for sustainable development and intercultural dialogue was launched Jacques Chirac died in Paris on September 26 2019