Édouard Balladur

Balladur started his political career in 1964 as an advisor to Prime Minister Georges Pompidou. After Pompidou's election as President of France in 1969, Balladur was appointed under-secretary general of the presidency then secretary general from 1973 to Pompidou's death in 1974.

He returned to politics in the 1980s as a supporter of Jacques Chirac. A member of the Neo-Gaullist Rally 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 without Socialist Party President François Mitterrand's resignation. As Minister of Economy and Finance, he implemented a liberal economic policy reminiscent of the one attributed to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He thus implemented a major privatisation programme, involving several companies nationalised in 1945 and 1982, such as the Compagnie Financière de Suez, Paribas and the Société Générale. He also privatised TF1. 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 the 1988 presidential election, part of the RPR held him responsible of the abandonment of Gaullist doctrine, but he kept the confidence of Chirac.

When the RPR/UDF coalition won the 1993 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 (notably Rhône-Poulenc, Banque Nationale de Paris and Elf).[3] Conveying the image of a quiet conservative, he did not question the wealth tax (reestablished by the Socialists in 1988).

He disagreed with François Mitterrand by considering that nuclear 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 the 1995 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 candidate Lionel Jospin and Chirac. He was thus eliminated from the final run-off election between the top two candidates, which Chirac won.

Chirac immediately appointed Alain 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 as Nicolas Sarkozy, were ostracized from the new Chirac administration.

Balladur failed to win the elections for the presidency of the Île-de-France region in 1998, the RPR nomination for the mayoralty of Paris in 2001, and the Chair of the National 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 the Union for a Popular Movement in 2002.

Following the 2007 French presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy nominated Balladur to the head of a committee for institutional reforms. The constitutional revision was approved by the Parliament in July 2008.

From 1968 to 1980, Balladur was president of the French company of the Mont 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 of Générale de Service Informatique (later merged into IBM 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 15th arrondissement of Paris, a conservative stronghold.

In 2008, Balladur visited the United States to speak at an event organized by the Streit Council, a Washington-based think 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 the Canard Enchaîné weekly or the Les Guignols de l'info TV show. Incidentally, the percentage of French government ministers who were also members of Le Siècle peaked at 72% under Balladur's Prime Ministership (1993–95).[5]

• 19 July 1994 – Minister of Communication Alain Carignon leaves the Cabinet and the Ministry is abolished.
• 17 October 1994 – José Rossi succeeds Longuet as Minister of Industry, Foreign Trade, Posts, and Telecommunications.
• 12 November 1994 – Bernard Debré succeeds Roussin as Minister of Cooperation