Chirac, the son of a bank employee, graduated from the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris in 1954, served as an officer in the French army in Algeria (1956–57), and earned a graduate degree from the École Nationale d'Administration in 1959. He then became a civil servant and rose rapidly through the ranks, serving as a department head and a secretary of state before becoming minister for parliamentary relations in 1971–72 under President Georges Pompidou. He was first elected to the National Assembly as a Gaullist in 1967. After serving as minister for agriculture (1972–74) and of the interior (1974), Chirac was appointed prime minister by newly elected President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1974. Citing personal and professional differences with Giscard, Chirac resigned from that office in 1976 and set about reconstituting the Gaullist Union of Democrats for the Republic into a neo-Gaullist group, the Rally for the Republic (RPR). With the party firmly under his control, he was elected mayor of Paris in 1977 and continued to build his political base among the several conservative parties of France.
Chirac's first campaign for the presidency in 1981 split the conservative vote with Giscard and thereby allowed the Socialist Party candidate, François Mitterrand, to win. In parliamentary elections held in 1986, the coalition of right-wing parties won a slim majority of seats in the National Assembly, and Chirac was appointed prime minister by Mitterrand. This power-sharing arrangement between the two posts was the first of its kind in the history of the Fifth Republic, in which previously the president and the prime minister had always belonged to the same party or the same electoral coalition.
In this arrangement, known as cohabitation, Chirac, as prime minister, was responsible for domestic affairs, while Mitterrand retained responsibility for foreign policy. Chirac's most important achievement during his second term was his administration's privatization of many major corporations that had been nationalized under Mitterrand. He also reduced payroll and other taxes in an effort to stimulate job creation in the private sector. As the candidate of the centre-right RPR, Chirac ran for the presidency against Mitterrand and was defeated in runoff elections in May 1988, whereupon he resigned the post of prime minister. Remaining mayor of Paris, he made his third run for the presidency in May 1995 and this time defeated the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin.
As president, Chirac tried to cut spending and thereby reduce the government's budget deficits so that France could qualify to participate in a single common European currency, the euro, which replaced the franc as France's sole currency in 2002. His proposed austerity measures, which included freezing the wages of public-sector employees and reducing some social welfare programs, provoked a massive general strike in late 1995. Nonetheless, Chirac continued to pursue policies of fiscal austerity despite unemployment that had reached record levels by early 1997. Hoping to win a mandate for his program, Chirac called for parliamentary elections in May 1997, but voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots for the left. His conservative coalition lost its majority in the parliament, and the Socialists were able to form a new coalition government with their leader, Jospin, as prime minister. Chirac also drew protests after authorizing nuclear tests in the South Pacific in 1995 and 1996. Despite presiding over a party accused of illegal fund-raising and being criticized for various ethical lapses, he won the first round of France's presidential balloting in 2002 over nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen and over Jospin, whose third-place showing eliminated him from the second round. With near-universal support from the political establishment in the second round—including from the French Communist Party and Jospin's Socialist Party—Chirac was easily reelected president, winning 82 percent of the vote to Le Pen's 18 percent—the largest margin of victory in any French presidential election.
The early part of Chirac's second term was dominated by U.S.- and British-led efforts to force the government of Ṣaddām Ḥussein in Iraq to comply fully with United Nations Security Council resolutions requiring it to abandon any weapons of mass destruction. In November 2002 France backed a U.S.-sponsored resolution mandating the return to Iraq of weapons inspectors, who had been withdrawn in 1998. In early 2003, after U.S. President George W. Bush declared that Iraq was in breach of its obligations under the resolution, Chirac, along with the governments of Germany and Russia, offered a proposal to toughen the inspections regime, a plan that was rejected by the United States as ineffective, given Iraq's earlier lack of cooperation with weapons inspectors. Despite this and later efforts by Chirac to prevent a war with Iraq, a U.S.-led coalition attacked the country in March 2003. In 2004 Chirac signed into law a controversial measure that prohibited head scarves and other religious symbols in state schools.
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