CHIRAC, JACQUES

born Nov. 29, 1932, Paris, France in full Jacques Ren Chirac politician who was twice prime minister (1974-76, 1986-88) of France and became the country's president in 1995. The son of a bank employee, Chirac graduated from the Institut d'tudes Politiques de Paris in 1954, served as an officer in Algeria (1956-57), and earned a graduate degree from the cole Nationale d'Administration in 1959. He then became a civil servant and rose rapidly through the ranks, serving as a department head and a secretary of state before becoming minister for parliamentary relations in 1971-72 under President Georges Pompidou. He was elected to the National Assembly as a Gaullist successively from 1967. After serving as minister for agriculture (1972-74) and of the interior (1974), Chirac was appointed prime minister by newly elected President Valry Giscard d'Estaing in 1974. Citing personal and professional differences with Giscard, Chirac resigned that office in 1976 and set about reconstituting the Gaullist Union of Democrats for the Republic into a neo-Gaullist group, the Rally for the Republic (RPR). With the party firmly under his control, he was elected mayor of Paris in 1977 and continued to build up his political base among the several conservative parties of France. Chirac's first campaign for the presidency in 1981 split the conservative vote with Giscard and thereby allowed the Socialist candidate, Franois Mitterrand, to win. In parliamentary elections held in 1986, the coalition of right-wing parties won a slim majority of seats in the National Assembly, and Chirac was appointed prime minister by Mitterrand. This power-sharing arrangement between the two posts was the first of its kind in the history of the Fifth Republic, in which previously the president and the prime minister had always belonged to the same party or the same electoral coalition. In this arrangement, known as cohabitation, Chirac as prime minister was responsible for domestic affairs while Mitterrand retained responsibility for foreign policy. Chirac's most important achievement during his second term was his administration's privatization of many major corporations that had been nationalized under Mitterrand. He also reduced payroll and other taxes in an effort to stimulate job creation in the private sector. As the candidate of the centre-right RPR, Chirac ran for the presidency against Mitterrand and was defeated in runoff elections in May 1988, whereupon he resigned the post of prime minister. Remaining mayor of Paris, he made his third run for the presidency in May 1995 and this time defeated the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin. Chirac named Alain Jupp as his prime minister. As president, Chirac tried to cut spending and thereby reduce the government's budget deficits so that France could qualify to participate in a single common European currency by the end of the century. His proposed austerity measures, which included freezing the wages of public-sector employees and reducing some social welfare programs, provoked a massive general strike in late 1995. Chirac continued to pursue policies of fiscal austerity despite the fact that unemployment had reached record levels by early 1997. Hoping to win a mandate for his program, Chirac called for parliamentary elections in May 1997, but voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the left. His conservative coalition lost its majority in parliament, and the Socialists were able to form a new coalition government with their leader, Jospin, as prime minister. Chirac also drew protests after authorizing nuclear tests in the South Pacific in 1995 and 1996.