Juppé returns to the Giscard-Chirac relationship: "The antagonism was real" but "exaggerated"

INTERVIEW

She is one of those stories that permeate political life, give it intensity, punctuate it for decades.

The power relationship between Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Jacques Chirac has been described at length in numerous works devoted to these two figures of the Fifth Republic, two heads of state with ambivalent personalities.

After the death of "VGE" on Wednesday evening, former Prime Minister Alain Juppé spoke Thursday evening at the microphone of Europe 1 on this link which united these two great political beasts, which he knew very well.

Exaggerated "pikes" among the Sages?

For Alain Juppé, "perhaps the hatred between the two men was exaggerated" in the 1970s and 1980s. "It has been said a lot that when they sat together on the Constitutional Council, they were permanent pikes ... I think we have exaggerated a little "the facts, from 2007 to 2019.

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However, "the antagonism was real" between Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Jacques Chirac, who was his Prime Minister at the start of his five-year term.

Between the Elysee and Matignon, relations are execrable and the Corrézien ends up slamming the door of the government in 1976.

Heart problem"

At the heart of the relationship between the two men, "there have been substantive and personality differences", marked throughout their careers.

"The personalities of Jacques Chirac and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing were profoundly different", insists Alain Juppé, referring to "the extraordinary intellectual machine" of the President elected in 1974, "which functioned impressively".

His sentence in front of Mitterrand turned against him a bit

"His problem was not the brain, it was perhaps the heart," continues the former Prime Minister, who campaigned with him at the 1989 Europeans. "Curiously, the phrase everyone is saying remembers in 1974, 'Monsieur Mitterrand, you don't have a monopoly of the heart', turned against him a little. Each time he took initiatives to show that he was close to people, it was appeared to be artificial, not natural. It was a difference with Jacques Chirac, who had this spontaneous contact, "underlines Alain Juppé, a lifelong Chiracian.

Chirac's true-false support for Mitterrand

There is, finally, the "battle" of 1981. The outgoing President, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, faces François Mitterrand in the second round of the presidential election.

Exit Jacques Chirac, candidate of the RPR against the one who had appointed him to Matignon seven years earlier.

The socialist wins in the end.

With the support of the Chirac clan?

This is what Valéry Giscard d'Estaing affirmed several years after his defeat: the former head of state recounted having called the RPR campaign HQ, posing as a "lost" activist between VGE and Mitterrand.

He would then have been advised to choose the socialist to cause the defeat of the outgoing.

"If Giscard had called me, I would have told him that I was going to vote for him", explains Alain Juppé today, who also recalls that "Jacques Chirac said he would have voted for Giscard in a personal capacity".