By Florence Loeve
Aug 31 (Reuters) - After losing the 1995 presidential election against his ally-turned-rival Jacques Chirac, former French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur wrote: "Moved? No." He added: "I would not have been any more so had I won."
A stiff technocrat, Balladur was often portrayed by his critics as aloof and disconnected from his contemporaries' preoccupations. Plantu, a press cartoonist, sketched him as an aristocrat wearing a wig and seated in a sedan chair. The satirical weekly
Le Canard enchaîné renamed him "His Courteous Smugness".
A leading figure of France's centre-right, Balladur was the architect of a sweeping privatisation drive that saw the sale of some of France's most prominent companies, including banks Société Générale and Paribas — later part of BNP Paribas — as well as broadcaster TF1. He also pushed through a reform of France's politically sensitive pension system in 1993.
Balladur played a crucial role in the early careers of several prominent politicians and businessmen, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy and billionaire Bernard Arnault's long-standing collaborator at luxury giant LVMH, Nicolas Bazire, who both worked for him during his 1995 run for office.
But that ill-fated campaign also caused lasting damage to his reputation, as courts scrutinised its financing. Following "a quarter-century of slander", as Balladur put it, he was finally cleared of any wrongdoing in 2021.
Balladur, the soft-spoken son of a banker, has died aged 97, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said on X on Monday. No cause of death was given.
"Edouard Balladur is closely associated with fifty years of the history of the Fifth Republic. From his early days working alongside Georges Pompidou to his appointment as Prime Minister, he was a leading figure in our public life," Lecornu said.
Balladur was born in 1929 in the coastal city of Izmir, in what was then the Ottoman Empire, into a Christian family.
Though he was often said to be of Armenian origin, his name sometimes presented as a shorter version of "Balladurian", Balladur always denied it.
His family had been part of Izmir's French community for generations, his father being a director at the Ottoman Bank.
His parents emigrated with their six children in 1934 before settling in Marseille, in the south of France.
After graduating from the Ecole nationale d'administration, the training ground of France's bureaucratic elite, Balladur entered government in 1964 as an adviser to Prime Minister Georges Pompidou.
A decade later, he served as then-President Pompidou's chief of staff.
Stepping away from politics after Pompidou's death in 1974, Balladur returned to a far more powerful role in 1986, as economy, finance and privatisation minister in Chirac's centre-right cabinet during the first "cohabitation" (power sharing) with Socialist President François Mitterrand.
Balladur implemented Chirac's bold programme of cutting taxes and government spending, liberalising the labour market, lifting price controls, and reprivatising some of France's state-owned banks and industrial companies.
'I WAS NOT A VERY GOOD CANDIDATE'
As Chirac, scalded by his defeat in the 1988 presidential election, no longer wished to serve as prime minister, Mitterrand appointed Balladur to the role in 1993.
As head of the government, Balladur extended his privatisation programme. But as a lifelong admirer of the general-turned-president Charles de Gaulle, he remained wary of the untrammelled influence of free markets and the United States, arguing in 1993: "What is the market? It is the law of the jungle, the law of nature. And what is civilisation? It is the struggle against nature."
Chirac supported the bid by Balladur, his "friend of 30 years" whom he knew "better than anyone", for the premiership with the idea that he would pave the way for his own path to the presidency. Instead, Balladur emerged as the more popular of the pair and in 1995 announced his candidacy for the Elysee Palace, sparking a bitter rivalry between the two men.
In a television interview, Balladur had forcefully argued that a prime minister in a power-sharing government should not run for president. "If there is to be another cohabitation, it would be desirable, so that the climate is calmer and life more peaceful, for the prime minister not to be a candidate in the presidential election," he said.
"I do not see how a man could stand before the French people in 1993 and tell them I will not be a candidate in two years and then be one. That would be breaking his word."
Balladur's U-turn — and the fratricidal conflict with Chirac — did not at first seem to undermine his chances. He entered the race as the clear favourite.
"For the public, the presidential election is already decided," the French daily Le Monde headlined in January 1995, judging that polls showed Balladur's "uncontested dominance" "over all his competitors", while the International Herald Tribune asserted that Chirac appeared to have lost the struggle for his own party's loyalty.
Arlette Chabot, a news anchor of the public broadcaster France 2, went so far as to ask Chirac whether he might withdraw his candidacy, infuriating the politician.
As he recounted in his book "Deux ans à Matignon" (Two years in the prime minister's official residence), Balladur presented himself as the candidate of "reason" and "truth", focused on economic growth and fiscal responsibility against what he considered as the false promises of his competitors.
But the dynamics of the race shifted rapidly. Balladur struggled on the campaign trail, appearing uncomfortable as he engaged with voters. "I refused to make people dream," he said in 1995.
The election returned the centre right to power after two consecutive Socialist terms, but with Chirac, not Balladur.
He was eliminated in the first round of voting, winning 18.58% of the vote to Chirac's 20.84%. Decades later, in a 2016 documentary by Jean-Charles Deniau, he conceded: "I was not a very good candidate."
The career of Nicolas Sarkozy, Balladur's protégé, would be derailed for some time by his fierce support for the losing candidate, much of his party having come to see him as having also betrayed Chirac.
STAYING IN POLITICS
After that, Balladur retained a seat in parliament until 2007 and presided over the Foreign Affairs Commission at the National Assembly for five years. He was also appointed by Sarkozy, then France's president, as the head of two commissions, including one that inspired amendments to the French Constitution in 2008.
But his 1995 campaign lingered over the rest of his career. Beyond turning him into a secondary player in French politics, it also fed years of suspicion. Prosecutors argued that Balladur's run for office had been financed with 10.25 million francs of kickbacks derived from arms contracts with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed while he was prime minister. Charged with complicity in the alleged misappropriation of public funds, Balladur always denied any wrongdoing.
In France, the case was all the more sensitive because of a 2002 suicide bomb attack in the Pakistani city of Karachi, which killed 11 employees of French-owned naval shipbuilder Direction des constructions navales, and wounded 12 others. All were involved in building one of the submarines planned under the contract with Pakistan.
Several families of victims filed a complaint against Balladur, one line of inquiry in the case focusing on the attack potentially being motivated by the French government's alleged suspension of bribe payments to Pakistani officials.
In 2021, the Court of Justice of the Republic acquitted the former prime minister in what came to be known as the Karachi scandal, ruling that there was no evidence that he had personally ordered payments linked to the contract, nor sufficient proof to establish the origins of his campaign financing.
His former colleague and supporter during the campaign, ex-defence minister François Léotard, was sentenced by the same court to a two-year suspended prison term and a €100,000 fine for complicity in the alleged misappropriation of public funds. In January 2025, Balladur's former campaign director Nicolas Bazire was acquitted on appeal after being given a jail sentence by a lower court.
In late October 2025, Balladur was seen by AFP visiting Sarkozy on the eve of his brief imprisonment, unrelated to the Karachi case. At the end of that year, Balladur announced in Le Figaro newspaper the death of his wife of 68 years, Marie-Josèphe. They had four sons, Pierre, Jerome, Henry and Romain.
(Writing by Olivier Holmey; Editing by Alistair Bell)
