Former French PM Édouard Balladur, once defeated by ally Jacques Chirac, dies at 97

Former French prime minister Édouard Balladur, who died on Monday at the age of 97, waged a bitter battle for the presidency against his friend Jacques Chirac that left deep scars in their centre-right party.

Chirac was stung to the quick when Balladur, whom he had groomed as his right-hand man, decided to run against him for president two years later.

Former president Nicolas Sarkozy was among the grandees of the Rally for the Republic, the party of war hero Charles de Gaulle, who ditched Chirac in favour of Balladur – but they backed the wrong horse.

Nicknamed Louis XV for his haughty manner, the patrician Balladur was ill-suited for the cut and thrust of the campaign trail and it was Chirac, the more personable of the two, who won the top job in 1995 by presenting himself as a more compassionate conservative. Édouard Balladur sits next to Jacques Chirac at the Hotel de Matignon in Paris on April 20, 1993.

For most of the campaign Balladur had been the man to beat, having impressed as an unflappable prime minister wrestling with a huge deficit.

But his pronounced double chin and pompous air made him prime fodder for cartoonists, with Le Monde daily invariably depicting him as an 18th-century monarch in a powdered wig being carried about by porters in a palanquin.

Born in the Turkish city of Smyrna, today called Izmir, on May 2, 1929, into a rich family of Catholic Armenian origin, Balladur's family emigrated to France when he was a boy.

He grew up in Marseille and later moved to Paris, where he attended the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration, a breeding ground for generations of senior French civil servants.

He helped to negotiate the accords that ended the May 1968 student and worker revolt and served as chief of staff to right-wing president Georges Pompidou until the latter's sudden death in 1974 from blood cancer.

Thatcher comparisons

In 1986, he became finance minister under then prime minister Chirac, with responsibility for privatising some of France's biggest state companies.

Balladur cut public spending and slashed the civil service, drawing comparisons with British Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher.

In 1993, he became prime minister of a "cohabitation" government, when the president (in this case François Mitterrand, a Socialist) and government (centre-right) are from opposite sides of the political divide.

His calm in the face of record unemployment and a ballooning public deficit made him immensely popular, despite him prescribing a bitter potion of austerity.

Flattered by polls showing strong support for him to run for president when Mitterrand's second term ended in 1995, Balladur threw his hat in the ring.

But after leading the race for months he crashed out in third place the first round of voting behind Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin and Chirac, who triumphed in the run-off.

He remained an MP until 2007.
In 2017, at the age of 88, he was charged with funnelling kickbacks on state arms deals with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia towards his failed presidential campaign.

He was acquitted of the charges but his former defence minister François Leotard was handed a suspended two-year prison term for misuse of assets.

Balladur was married with four sons. His family told AFP that a private Mass will be held for the former premier, without giving further details.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)