Chirac’s approval ratings up
Jacques Chirac’s approval ratings rose from 16 percent to 24 percent.
A TNS Sofres poll this month gave him an approval rating of 24 percent, up from 16 percent last July, but still making him the most unpopular French president since the firm began presidential polling in 1978.
The disillusionment with Mr. Chirac is not only personal but also a reflection of the dread among the French public that their nation has lost its glory abroad and its way at home. That feeling is especially acute on the anniversary this week of the brutal unrest that gripped several suburbs a year ago.
Widespread criticism that little has changed to improve the plight of the country’s underclass underscores a larger point: that Mr. Chirac’s 1995 campaign promises to “mend the social fracture” in France and reduce unemployment, among other things, have been unfulfilled.
The most recent bludgeoning came on two evenings this week, in a four-hour documentary of his political career that aired on France 2 television — the first time an assessment of a sitting president has been shown on public television in prime time.
France’s political elite — many of them onetime friends and colleagues of Mr. Chirac — lined up to tell stories about his thirst for power, his betrayals, his opportunism and his policy U-turns that have earned him the nickname “the Weathervane.”
“A sort of political Don Juan, more preoccupied with the conquest or the preservation of power than by its execution,” said Philippe Séguin, a minister in the 1980s.
A “chevalier of opportunism” who put into place a system of “corruption” in the years he was mayor of Paris, said Raymond Barre, the former prime minister who was part of Mr. Chirac’s own camp.
Olivier Stirn, a former minister who worked under Mr. Chirac in the 1970s, described him even more brutally. “Chirac,” he said, “is a killer.”
nytimes
Stumble it!