As May 7, 2025 approaches, the thirtieth anniversary of the first election to the presidency of the Republic of Jacques Chirac, there is no doubt that many personalities will claim to be Chiraquists or present themselves as heirs.
“For me, Jacques Chirac is the last great Gaullist and Pompidolian figure”estimates Jean-Baptiste Voisin, grandson of André-Georges Voisin, former president of the general council of Indre-et-Loire, and founding president of the Chiraquiens, an association which seeks to keep the memory of Jacques Chirac alive. “I don’t think there will be another one,” he said, citing the desire of Corrézien to always “reconcile all French people”.
Embodying a social right of solidarity
If there are still guardians of the temple, such as Alain Juppé, Jean-Louis Debré, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, François Baroin, Philippe Briand or Renaud Muselier, for Jean-Baptiste Voisin, being Chiracian today is “embody a social right and solidarity to defend the most deprived and bring a unique voice to the international scene”.
73,21
This is, as a percentage, the share of French people who approved the transition from seven to five years for the President of the Republic, from September 24, 2000.
On this second point, however, it is difficult to find a connection. “After him, the world changed”says Frédéric Charillon, professor of political science at Paris Cité University, co-director of the geopolitical defense and leadership center at Essec business school and author of Wars of influence (Odile Jacob editions).
“Jacques Chirac was president at a time that was the high point of American domination. Today we have to deal with China, Russia, India, the Gulf, a new Africa, an America turned in on itself, an Indo-Pacific region or a Middle East in turmoil. he explains.
A time when hopes for peace were allowed. “There is nothing left of the dialogue with Russia, nor of the peace process in the Middle East. France was taken out of Africa”, analyzes Frédéric Charillon.
It is also difficult to talk about inheritance because “there have been several Jacques Chiracs” on the international scene. The first, from 1995 to the dissolution of 1997, “opposes Serbia in the Balkans and restores authority to Western troops”, but announces the resumption of nuclear tests.
That of cohabitation with Lionel Jospin “works well” with Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine. “A new Chirac seems to be born on the diplomatic level. Open to the non-Western world and to cross-cutting subjects”notes Frédéric Charillon.
The need to understand distant societies
Finally, there is the Jacques Chirac of the second term with strong speeches – notably environmentalist in South Africa with the phrase “our house burns » – and his opposition to the American war in Iraq. But the failure of the referendum on the European Union in 2005, after his health accident, “will result in an end of reign largely tinged with immobility”says Frédéric Charillon.
-However, if he has not succeeded in everything, Jacques Chirac “understood better than others the demand for cultural recognition of a now plural world, the importance of fighting against the shock of ignorance, the need to understand distant societies to succeed in one’s own diplomacy”, even if he did it by betting “too much on the emotional and interpersonal relations between heads of state”.
Like you, I want a vigorous, impartial State, demanding of itself and concerned with the proper use of public funds, a State which does not isolate those who govern from the people who chose them.
Jacques Chirac, the evening of his victory on May 7, 1995
Dogmatically, it is “difficult to have a definition of Chiraquism because Jacques Chirac evolved a lot during his political life”, notes the political scientist and researcher associated with Cersa Olivier Rouquan (and author of an article on the regime crisis of the Ve Republic in the Political and parliamentary review). Its institutional record is “hardly defensible” : he decided on a dissolution two years after his arrival at the Élysée, which forced him to cohabit for five years with Lionel Jospin, and after his re-election in 2002, the 2005 referendum on the treaty establishing a Constitution for the Europe is rejected.
“And that’s where the problems start for him.”according to Olivier Rouquan. Jacques Chirac, “it’s a right that can sometimes be atypical in the sense that it can go against mainstream trends (grand public). Égletons’ call for French-style laborism is an example. »
A temperate right, humanist values
The politician sees in him a sort of “radicalism”. “There were times when he bordered on populism or neo-populism,” especially during declarations “epidermal”, like his sentence on “the noise and the smell” delivered in Orléans during a dinner debate in 1991. “But deep down, Jacques Chirac is a temperate right that is anchored on humanist and republican values. There is consistency and intransigence: he has not wavered in his opposition to a rapprochement with the National Front. »
His legacy is reflected in a « incarnation » of power, a direct lineage with Georges Pompidou: the emanation of a “Rural and traditional France” with “bonhomie”. The caricature of Jacques Chirac drinking beers with Guignols, “who owes a lot to his daughter’s communication strategy”was still “relatively sincere”believes Olivier Rouquan.
Finally, if it is difficult to see direct heirs of Jacques Chirac, it is because “the political balance changed a lot when Nicolas Sarkozy passed” at the Élysée. “In the official discourse of the right and the Republicans, the temperate, humanist and even social dimension takes second place, notes Olivier Rouquan. Security, immigration and neoliberalism are becoming the new markers. »
At the social fractures of 1995
The “social divide”, the theme of Jacques Chirac’s presidential campaign in 1995, is a masterstroke on the political level, as well as in terms of communication. In the vein of social Gaullism defended by the candidate, Jacques Chirac recalled that he did not intend to sacrifice the welfare state on the altar of neoliberalism. In the countryside, this makes it possible to respond to “a crisis reality of the times”explains political scientist Olivier Rouquan. Enough to dissociate him from his rival for the Élysée Édouard Balladur. Occupying this social terrain also allows it to take advantage of the field left empty by socialists busy “manage the post-Mitterrand years”.
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