CHIRAC

Bad news on Le Quatorze.



The man who deserves a red card.


AS JACQUES CHIRAC opens the Elysée Palace on July 14th, for his annual garden party, it is surely clear that this Bastille Day will be his last as president. Although the 73-year-old veteran has said he will decide whether to run again for next spring's presidential election only early in 2007, it now looks all but impossible. His government is paralysed, his prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, is unloved, and the French have had enough.
A sense of fin de règne was confirmed last weekend on the football pitch. Zinédine Zidane, the captain of the French team, was sent off during the World Cup final, which Italy won on a penalty shoot-out. It was a painfully fitting metaphor for the country's general malaise. The victorious multi-ethnic French champions of 1998 appeared, in those heady days of economic growth and new dynamism, to embody a fresh national spirit. This time, hopes of recapturing that glory were vested in Mr Zidane, the working-class son of Algerian immigrants. De Gaulle-like, he came out of retirement to lead the team. In the end, provoked by an insult, he got a red card for head-butting an Italian player, leaving the field in disgrace and the French without their promised saviour.


A similar yearning for somebody to rescue France from its melancholy hangs in the political air. After 11 years in the presidency, Mr Chirac has come to embody the country's political inability to renew itself. In politics for 41 years, he is the only serving politician who has belonged to governments under every fifth-republic president since de Gaulle. His popularity has collapsed. According to TNS Sofrès, a pollster, Mr Chirac is now the most unpopular French president since its polling began in 1978. Libération put it well this week: “For a month, France has been dreaming with Zidane. This morning, it wakes up to Chirac.”
It is a measure of their despondency that the French have begun to write the president's political obituary. Franz-Olivier Giesbert's trenchant account of Mr Chirac's past 20 years, “La Tragédie du Président”, has been a bestseller for months. The author is merciless: “By cowardice as much as by blindness, he persists in pursuing policies which, for over 20 years, have been leading the country to ruin.” A satirical documentary, “Dans la Peau de Jacques Chirac”, is showing in cinemas. Le Monde recently called on the president to resign.
Certainly, the record of the past decade has been meagre. Mr Chirac was elected in 1995 on promises to cut taxes, to curb unemployment and to “mend the social fracture”. Yet, under his watch, France has slipped out of the world's top five economies. Its public debt has swollen from 55% of GDP to 66%; unemployment has never dropped below 8%. At the start of Mr Chirac's reign in 1995, France was paralysed by strikes against reforms, and governed by an imperious, unloved prime minister, Alain Juppé. Now, towards its end, France has seen 1m-3m people on the streets in a student-led protest against labour-market reforms, and is governed by the imperious, unloved Mr de Villepin. A president who promoted the construction of a strong Europe, to counter-balance America in a multi-polar world, failed to persuade his own people to vote for its new constitution in last year's referendum.
The disappointment is bitter. Some had hoped that the man who, as prime minister in the 1980s, launched privatisation and abolished the wealth tax, would rediscover his liberalising zeal. “The French machine no longer works,” he declared in his 1995 election campaign. Yet, after a bold but failed attempt that year, Mr Chirac gave up on anything more ambitious than little réformettes, such as those of pensions and health. Income-tax cuts have fallen far short of his pledges. These days, indeed, Mr Chirac blends leftish anti-liberalism with an ardent defence of France's traditional “social model” against those, including his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who argue that after 20 years of stagnation it might need reinventing.
As for mending the social fracture, Mr Chirac did his best this week to lean once more on the multiracial French football team as a lesson in integration. “France”, he told the players, whom he hosted for lunch, “is stronger when it is brought together in its diversity.” Mr Chirac has, commendably, made a point of trying to stamp out racism and anti-Semitism on his watch. He was the first president to accept the official responsibility of the French state for the deportation of Jews from Vichy France during the occupation. This week, he honoured the 100th anniversary of the rehabilitation of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer wrongly condemned for treason. And he has long supported Turkey's entry into the European Union, against the wishes of voters as well as most of his party.
Yet the riots that swept through France's banlieues last autumn punctured any lingering illusions that the multi-ethnic country was truly at ease with itself—or that integration on the football field could be easily replicated off it. This is a country, after all, where the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the presidential run-off in 2002. The National Front leader remains a threat. During the World Cup, he declared that “France does not totally recognise itself” in its mostly-black team. Yet voter support has proved steady. If both Mr Chirac and Mr Sarkozy stood for the right in the first round next year, said a Paris-Match poll last week, Mr Chirac would score just 8%—and Mr Le Pen 12%.