Chirac Losing Grip on Rally for the Republic

Last month, Jacques Chirac, reputedly one of the smoothest and canniest operators in French politics, lost control of the government and legislature. This week, his party may also have slipped from his hands.

France’s president, whose powers under the Fifth Republic are often likened to those of a constitutional monarch, is now in a drastically weaker situation than any of his predecessors. Chirac’s problems can only rebound to the advantage of the country’s new left-wing government, led by Socialist Lionel Jospin.

The Rassemblement pour la Republique--Rally for the Republic--was a Chirac creation founded 21 years ago to prolong the complex political heritage of Gen. Charles de Gaulle and give the ambitious Chirac, then 44, a bully pulpit to woo French voters.

In its history, the tightly organized party had but two presidents: Chirac himself and his loyal lieutenant Alain Juppe, a brilliant--if aloof--technocrat.

When a snap election called by Chirac resulted in defeat in June for Juppe’s government and the center-right majority it had counted on in Parliament, it forced Chirac to share power with the left.

The unforeseen rout also doomed Chirac’s attempts to keep Juppe at the summit of the stunned and divided RPR, which saw its share of seats in the National Assembly plummet from 258 to 138. A party meeting Sunday, instead, elected the former speaker of Parliament, Philippe Seguin, 54, as new president of the neo-Gaullists with 78.85% of delegates’ ballots.

Seguin, a lumbering bear of a man and a stirring, basso-voiced orator, was one of the leaders on the French right of the campaign against the 1992 Maastricht Treaty for closer European integration and a single currency--a pact Chirac supported.

In recent months, Seguin also made clear that he believes the RPR’s founder hasn’t delivered on many of his campaign promises to bridge the country’s “social divide” and pay ordinary people more so they can live better.

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The political career of the Tunisian-born Seguin, something of an outsider in the well-born circles of the French right but popular with voters, has been entangled with that of Chirac since at least 1973, when he was hired to oversee agricultural questions as a presidential aide. The minister he was technically overseeing was Chirac.

Two years ago, Chirac preferred to hand the supreme post in the RPR to his crony Juppe rather than to Seguin, a self-described “leftist Gaullist.”

When electoral defeat suddenly seemed possible this spring, Chirac let it be understood that Seguin, who has spoken out against the injustices and suffering caused by full-throttle, unregulated capitalism, would become France’s new prime minister, sharing economic decision-making with leading free marketeer Alain Madelin.

Voters weren’t convinced.

The weekend RPR convention in Vincennes bared deep schisms in the party. Former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, who outraged Chirac loyalists by running against his old ally for the French presidency in 1995, was lustily booed.

“Dissension was strong before dissolution [of Parliament], and with defeat, people have their backs to the wall,” said Pascal Perrineau of the Paris-based Study Center on French Political Life.

Seguin, touted by many as presidential timber capable of challenging Chirac for France’s top job, vowed to seek reconciliation among the clashing clans. “We must be together, or it’s together that we will disappear,” he cautioned. On Thursday, he appointed a 10-member transitional leadership team that included Nicolas Sarkozy, a Balladur ally whom Chirac is said to detest in particular, as RPR spokesman and coordinator.

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Chirac, more favorable to European integration and easing state controls on the economy than Seguin, still has some trumps left by dint of his network in the RPR and his constitutional prerogatives. In a year, he could dissolve the National Assembly once again and call new elections. He could resign as president, or seek to limit the current seven-year French presidential term to five and run to succeed himself before the next scheduled election in 2002.

“The political agenda is in Chirac’s hands,” Perrineau said.