How will Chirac be remembered in France?
Chirac was elected, at his third attempt, in 1995. France was then a fractiously divided nation, with high unemployment and no consensus on how to adapt to the new global economy, while preserving what was most successful, and most French, about France. There was an alarming contempt for mainstream politicians and institutions and a drift to the demagogic and blindly nationalist extremes of right and left. Chirac promised to heal the “social fracture” of the nation. Eleven years and seven months later, France is exactly where it was in 1995. If anything, the country’s democratic health has declined. Cynicism and the attraction of the blind alleys of far right and far left have grown. Domestically, the Chirac years will go down as 12 years of wasted time. A couple of attempts at timid economic and social reform were interrupted by a co-habitation with a Socialist government, whose monument is the shorter, 35-hour working week (something detested by the centre-right). The suburban riots
