The strange case of Jacques Chirac

Nick Fraser Guardian News Service London

"La France S'ennuie," declared a famous newspaper headline just before the 1968 upheavals. A degree of pervasive, toxic boredom rarely seen in French politics has so far characterized the French presidential elections, which begin later this month.

This makes for a sadly undiverting spectacle if you still believe that France is the place where revolutions in the human spirit occur. But it would be wrong to dismiss what is going on as having no importance. This is France's first election since the appearance of the euro. British europhobes should note that no protest candidates are running against the popular new currency. Chauvinism is not this year's fashion.

The only real campaign theme was posed the moment Jacques Chirac announced that he intended to stand again as president. Should anyone under investigation for three separate sets of criminal offenses be running for president? Should such a tainted figure not have been removed from office long ago?

Chirac, known as "le bulldozer", is an astute and seductive politician whose many years at the top have left him with hands that are not wholly clean. For the past seven years judicial investigations have centered on the period in the 1980s when he presided, as mayor of Paris, over the creation of a substantial system of party financing involving kickbacks in the lucrative public construction business.

Eric Halphen, the investigating magistrate who looked into these matters until he resigned earlier this year, has written a book describing the well-oiled system presided over by Chirac. Other witnesses, including a former chauffeur, have come forward to describe Jacques' habit of paying for holidays in cash, or using the municipal limousine to visit mistresses.

The ex-president loftily replies that such allegations are "suspicions, rumors and dirt", and that what he was doing reflected the practices of the time. But Chirac's real position is that he is not legally bound to answer such charges. After attempts at impeachment, the supreme court last year upheld this view. The judges ruled that a president could only be booted out if found guilty of high treason. This meant that Chirac would face corruption charges only when he finally retired or was voted out of office -- and gave him an overpowering reason to wish to be re-elected.

Traditionally, presidents of France have been harmless political hacks. "There are only two wholly useless organs," Georges Clemenceau once declared, "the presidency and the prostate." In 1958 Charles de Gaulle attempted to restore dignity to the office. He believed that the president should combine the virtues of republican monarch and national sage, and his constitution gave the presidency powers that fell little short of dictatorship. But with the ebbing of nationalist pretensions, De Gaulle's vision decayed into irrelevance.

French monarchical republicanism was dealt a fatal blow by the enforced "cohabitation". This occurred when Mitterrand and then Chirac lost parliamentary elections, finding themselves obliged to share power with prime ministers who were their political opponents. Voters won't know if they voted for an autocrat or another version of the powerless figure that Chirac has latterly seemed, until parliamentary elections take place in two months' time. No wonder they feel a touch jaded.

Chirac is gambling on his charm, and on the cynicism of French voters. "Vote for me," his campaign says every day. "I'm just like you." If the polls are to be believed, he appears to have badly misread his fellow citizens. His promise to allow future presidents to be hauled before magistrates (of course his own actions would remain uninvestigated) was greeted with howls of derision.

Perhaps France has changed faster than its politicians are prepared to allow. Among the elite, comparisons between Chirac and the much-hated Silvio Berlusconi are now de rigueur. "We don't want to be Latin in that pejorative way," the head of a fashionable thinktank told me. "It's important to think of ourselves as being Europeans."

To Blairites there is no doubt something absurd about a man who spent 10 years in the company of a Trotskyist sect discussing the coming revolution. But the plodding, schoolmasterly Lionel Jospin cannot be so easily dismissed. He, too, has expressed cautious enthusiasm for changing the creaky French system.

A modernized France purged of its antiquarian practices would prove a real challenge to Britain in Europe. Who knows, it might even make us think about what it means to be a modern European nation. But any French citizen, regardless of political views, should feel a shadow of distaste placing a voting slip marked Chirac into the ballot box.