Chirac of France: A New Leader of the West?

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After his first six months as president of France, Jacques Chirac, like the proverbial prophet, is more honored abroad than at home. The discrepancy is sharpest with the United States, where the press has been quick to appreciate Chirac's "bulldozer" style, particularly in contrast with the wavering image of President Bill Clinton. Where Clinton has appeared undecided, if not disinterested, in foreign policy, Chirac has come across as forceful, experienced, and knowledgeable. The comparison has been a near-reversal of that purveyed by the American media 14 years ago, when François Mitterrand was first elected president of France. Dismay and anxiety greeted the coming to power of Mitterrand's socialist-communist coalition, while across the Atlantic an air of confidence surrounded the new Reagan conservative revolution with its "America is back" assertiveness.

Today the French public is far less enthusiastic about the performance of its new leader and his government. Judging from the rapid downward trend of opinion polls, Chirac has been granted the shortest honeymoon in the history of France's Fifth Republic. In part such vicissitudes reflect the difficulty of governance afflicting most of the Western democratic world in the absence of a clear external threat and in the presence of internal economic and social problems. But for a fuller explanation, one must look also to the self-willed character of Chirac and the contradictory actions of his government, headed by Prime Minister Alain Juppé.

In socioeconomic terms France perfectly illustrates the contemporary challenges of stimulating adequate economic growth while keeping inflation low, of reducing public budgets while preserving social benefits, and of satisfying a still-rigid corporatist society while fitting itself to the constraints of integration, including a common currency, envisioned in a Maastricht Europe. The greatest challenge for Chirac may lie in the contradictory nature of these goals or in the incompatibility of the means to those ends.