Eloïse Bertil 08h00, November 01, 2022

STORY - The Balladur-Chirac duo was one of the most powerful of the Fifth Republic.

But as with many other political tandems whose story Catherine Nay tells in her podcast "Inseparable", ambition got the better of the two thirty-year-old friends.

Double seduction, unspoken, rupture: Catherine Nay reveals the mysteries of their fight for power from 1993.

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"In 1993, Jacques Chirac understood that the one who gave him notes had become a political power, and that he did not intend to share power with him", says Catherine Nay in a tone of confidence in the second episode devoted to the couple Chirac-Balladur.

Edouard Balladur becomes Prime Minister.

He is very popular and his relationship with Jacques Chirac begins to deteriorate.

His "thirty-year-old friend" is drifting away.

He hardly answers her calls anymore, and when he does, it's just to hang up on her, pretending he doesn't have time.

"He didn't want to see that Edouard had already become his boss. Then he understood that Edouard had prepared himself" explains Catherine Nay.

Want to listen to the other episodes of the "Inseparable" podcast?

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In this climate of tension, one evening, Jacques Chirac decides to cancel a dinner to which he had invited Edouard Balladur and his wife Marie-Josèphe Delacour.

Nicolas Sarkozy dissuades him, and the dinner occurs as planned.

With one detail: the Balladur do not arrive alone.

Without warning, they arrive at the Chiracs with… their dog.

Bernadette Chirac sees red.

"But look, who do they think they are?", imitates Catherine Nay.

Following this affront, she slips to her husband: "Beware, he is no longer a friend like before." 


Jacques Chirac and Edouard Balladur is the story of "two thirty-year-old friends".

Everything opposes those who are considered the "spiritual sons" of Georges Pompidou: the first is a real political animal, while the second is a man in the shadows.

But how did their relationship go from cordial agreement to irreversible rupture?

In this "Inseparable" podcast produced by Europe 1 Studio, journalist Catherine Nay, great voice of Europe 1, tells the stories of political couples or duos that marked the Fifth Republic.

In this first part, the Balladur-Chirac tandem met in 1964, when Edouard Balladur arrived in Matignon, where Jacques Chirac had already been working for two years.

It ends at the approach of the





Find "Inseparable, Catherine Nay tells the story of couples at the Elysée" on: http://www.europe1.fr/emissions/inseparables


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Jacques Chirac really becomes aware of the shadow that his former adviser casts on him during the RPR's parliamentary days in September.

After lunch, Edouard Balladur boarded the biggest plane, the one reserved for the Prime Minister;

Jacques Chirac gets into the second but the hostesses ask him to come down because the plane is reserved for Charles Pasqua, then Minister of the Interior.

Chirac finds himself in a third plane, much smaller.

"It was almost an image of announced defeat," recalls Catherine Nay.

>> Test your knowledge of the great political duos of the Fifth Republic with this quiz on the Balladur-Chirac and 

Nicolas Sarkozy-Cécilia episodes

The events that will follow will confirm it: their friendship is broken.

It is as if the pact of trust had never existed.

"It was Jacques Chirac himself who made a rival, it was he who wanted to install Edouard Balladur in Matignon", recalls Catherine Nay.

To discover behind the scenes of the final break of the Balladur-Chirac duo, listen to the full story in "Inseparable", a Europe 1 Studio production.

>> Also discover the meeting between Nicolas Sarkozy and Cécilia in Neuilly, the beginnings of the relationship between Jacques Chirac and Bernadette at Sciences Po or even the entry of Georges Pompidou into Charles de Gaulle's cabinet