Jacques Chirac (29 November 1932 – 26 September 2019) was President of France from 17 May 1995 to 16 May 2007, succeeding Francois Mitterrand and preceding Nicolas Sarkozy.
Biography[]
Jacques Chirac was born on 29 November 1932 in Paris, France, and he was a member of the French Communist Party in the 1950s. Chirac used personal connections so that he could be sent to fight in the Algerian War, but he was barred from being an officer due to his communist sympathies. Chirac gained a French National Assembly seat in 1967 and became Minister of the Interior in 1974, becoming Mayor of Paris in 1997 and serving in that post until 1995. In 1986, Prime Minister Francois Mitterrand decided to appoint Chirac as his Prime Minister, and in 1995 Chirac won the presidency of France as the candidate for the Rally for the Republic, a conservative party. He lowered tax rates, privatized business, and strongly punished crime and terrorism, but he later changed his views to oppose laissez-faire economics and ultraliberalism, founding the Union for a Popular Movement party in 2002. Chirac controversially decided to betray his alliance with the United States and United Kingdom by deciding to not join NATO in the Iraq War in 2003, causing for US-French relations to cool. In 2007, Chirac chose not to seek a third term as President, and in 2011 he was sentenced to two years in prison for corruption. He died in 2019 at the age of 86.