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Édouard Balladur | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Balladur in 1993 | |
| Prime Minister of France | |
| In office 29 March 1993 – 17 May 1995 | |
| President | François Mitterrand |
| Preceded by | Pierre Bérégovoy |
| Succeeded by | Alain Juppé |
| Minister of Finance | |
| In office 20 March 1986 – 12 May 1988 | |
| Prime Minister | Jacques Chirac |
| Preceded by | Pierre Bérégovoy |
| Succeeded by | Pierre Bérégovoy |
| General Secretary of the President | |
| In office 5 April 1973 – 2 April 1974 | |
| President | Georges Pompidou |
| Preceded by | Michel Jobert |
| Succeeded by | Bernard Beck |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Édouard Léon Raoul Balladur (1929-05-02)2 May 1929 (age 96) İzmir, Turkey |
| Political party | LR (2015–present) |
| Other political affiliations | |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 4 |
| Education | |
Édouard Balladur (French:[edwaʁbaladyʁ]; born 2 May 1929[1]) is a French politician who served asPrime Minister of France underFrançois Mitterrand from 29 March 1993 to 17 May 1995. He unsuccessfully ran for president in the1995 French presidential election, coming in third place.
Balladur was born inİzmir,Turkey, to aLevantine family ofArmenian ancestry, with longstanding ties to France. The family with five children emigrated toMarseille in the mid-to-late 1930s.[2]
In 1957, Balladur married Marie-Josèphe Delacour, with whom he had four sons.
Balladur started his political career in 1964 as an advisor to Prime MinisterGeorges Pompidou. After Pompidou's election asPresident of France in 1969, Balladur was appointed under-secretary general of the presidency then secretary general from 1973 to Pompidou's death in 1974.
Balladur returned to politics in the 1980s as a supporter ofJacques Chirac. A member of the Neo-GaullistRally for the Republic (RPR) party, he was the theoretician behind the "cohabitation government" from 1986 to 1988, explaining that if the right won the legislative election, it could govern with Chirac as prime minister withoutSocialist Party PresidentFrançois Mitterrand's resignation. AsMinister of Economy and Finance, he implemented aliberal economic policy reminiscent of the one attributed toRonald Reagan andMargaret Thatcher. He thus implemented a majorprivatisation programme, involving several companies nationalised in 1945 and 1982, such as theCompagnie Financière de Suez,Paribas and theSociété Générale. He also privatisedTF1. He also reduced the number of civil servants and state expenditure.
Balladur appeared as an unofficial deputy prime minister in the cabinet led by Chirac. He took a major part in the adoption of liberal and pro-European policies by Chirac and the RPR. After Chirac's defeat at the1988 presidential election, part of the RPR held him responsible of the abandonment ofGaullist doctrine, but he kept the confidence of Chirac.
When the RPR/UDF coalition won the1993 legislative election, Chirac declined to become prime minister again in a second "cohabitation" with President Mitterrand, and Balladur became prime minister. He was faced with a difficult economic situation, but he did not want to make the political errors of the previous cohabitation government. He continued the economic policy he had undertaken in 1986 by carrying out new privatisations (notablyRhône-Poulenc,Banque Nationale de Paris andElf).[3] Conveying the image of a quiet conservative, he did not question the wealth tax (reestablished by the Socialists in 1988).
Balladur disagreed with François Mitterrand by considering thatnuclear tests were necessary to maintain the credibility of the French deterrent.
Despite corruption affairs affecting some of his ministers, who he forced to resign (thus lending his name to the so-called "Balladur jurisprudence"), he had the support of influential media.
When he became prime minister, Balladur had promised Chirac that he would not enter the1995 presidential election, and that he would support Chirac's candidacy. However, a number of right-wing politicians advised Balladur to run for the presidency in 1995. He went back on his promise to Chirac and entered the campaign. When he announced his candidacy, four months before the election, he was considered the favourite. In the polls, he led Chirac by almost 20 points. However, from the position of an outsider, Chirac criticized Balladur as representing "dominant ideas", and the gap in the polls decreased quickly. The revelation of a bugging scandal which implicated Balladur also contributed to a drop in his popularity among voters.
In the first round of the election, Balladur finished in third place with 18.6% of the vote behind the Socialist candidateLionel Jospin and Chirac. He was thus eliminated from the final run-off election between the top two candidates, which Chirac won.
Chirac immediately appointedAlain Juppé to replace Balladur as prime minister. Despite Chirac declaring that he and Balladur had been "friends for 30 years", Balladur's decision to stand against him greatly strained their relationship. As a result, the "Balladuriens" who had supported him in the presidential election, such asNicolas Sarkozy, were ostracized from the new Chirac administration.
Balladur failed to win the elections for the presidency of theÎle-de-France region in 1998, the RPR nomination for the mayoralty of Paris in 2001, and the Chair of theNational Assembly in 2002. He presided over the National Assembly's foreign affairs committee during his last parliamentary term (2002–2007). Since the 1980s, he had advocated the unification of the right-wing groupings into a single large party, but it was Chirac who managed the feat, with the creation of theUnion for a Popular Movement in 2002.
Following the2007 French presidential election,Nicolas Sarkozy nominated Balladur to the head of a committee for institutional reforms. Theconstitutional revision was approved by the Parliament in July 2008.
From 1968 to 1980, Balladur was president of the French company of theMont Blanc Tunnel while occupying various other positions in ministerial staff. Following the 1999 deadly accident in the tunnel, he gave evidence to the court judging the case in 2005 about the security measures he had or had not taken. Balladur claimed that he always took security seriously, but that it was difficult to agree on anything with the Italian company operating the Italian part of the tunnel. From 1977 to 1986, he was president ofGénérale de Service Informatique (later merged intoIBM Global Services), making him one of the few French politicians with business experience.
In 2006, he announced that he would not run again for re-election in 2007 as a member of Parliament for the 15tharrondissement of Paris, a conservative stronghold.
In 2008, Balladur visited the United States to speak at an event organized by the Streit Council, aWashington-basedthink tank. Balladur presented his latest book, in which he outlined a concept for a "Union of the West".[4]
Balladur is often caricatured as aloof, aristocratic, and arrogant in media, such as theCanard Enchaîné weekly or theLes Guignols de l'info TV show. Incidentally, the percentage ofFrench government ministers who were also members ofLe Siècle peaked at 72% under Balladur'sPrime Ministership (1993–1995).[5]
Investigativeforensic accounting enabled by theleakedPanama Papers revealed aspects of theKarachi affair, also dubbed "Karachigate", with the Ministry of Justice examining whether armament contract commissions paid bySaudi Arabia, thenPakistan, financed the 1995 presidential campaigns of Balladur or Chirac, whose administration then succeeded in taking office.[6] In May 2017, Balladur and his former Defence MinisterFrançois Léotard were each charged, in relation to the Pakistan deal, with "complicity in misuse of corporate assets and concealment".[7] In June 2019, Balladur's former campaign manager, Nicolas Bazire, was one of six men convicted over the arms deal, and was sentenced to three years imprisonment for using "illegal funds" in Balladur's 1995 campaign.[7] On 4 March 2021, Édouard Balladur was acquitted by theCourt of Justice of the Republic, a special court that tries members of the government for actions performed in the exercise of their functions.[8]
(29 March 1993–17 May 1995)
Chirac's appointee as finance minister - effectively No. 2 to the prime minister - was the prime, precisely-worded Édouard Balladur, born in Turkey of an Armenian family who emigrated to Marseille in the 1930s.
Media related toÉdouard Balladur at Wikimedia Commons| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | General Secretary of the President 1973–1974 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Minister of the Economy, Finance and Privatization 1986–1988 | Succeeded by |
| Prime Minister of France 1993–1995 | Succeeded by | |
| Order of precedence | ||
| Preceded byas Former Prime Minister | Order of precedence of France Former Prime Minister | Succeeded byas Former Prime Minister |
