'Devoted servant of the nation': Former French PM Édouard Balladur dies aged 97
President Emmanuel Macron said Balladur was a man who "had France at heart" and a "devoted servant of the nation", while former president Nicolas Sarkozy said he had lost "an example, a mentor and a friend".
"Tonight, I mourn the loss of one of the men who mattered most in my life," Sarkozy wrote on social media platform X.
The family told French news agency AFP that a private mass will be held for Balladur, without giving further details.
Born in the Turkish city of Smyrna, today called Izmir, on 2 May, 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.
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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 Francois 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. The symbol of a harmonious cohabitation: President François Mitterrand and Prime Minister Édouard Balladur in Ajaccio, 10 September, 1993.
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.
Chirac was stung to the quick when Balladur, whom he had groomed as his right-hand man, decided to run against him for president.
Their battle for leadership left deep scars on their centre-right party.
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.
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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.
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 Francois Leotard was handed a suspended two-year prison term for misuse of assets.
Balladur was married with four sons.
(with AFP)