Bernadette Chirac, the steel-willed former first lady of France who spent 12 years at the Élysée Palace from 1995 to 2007 beside President Jacques Chirac while building her own political power in rural Corrèze and turning a children’s hospital charity into a national institution, has died. She was 93. Keywords for this article Source link
Bernadette Chirac, the steel-willed former first lady of France who spent 12 years at the Élysée Palace from 1995 to 2007 beside President Jacques Chirac while building her own political power in rural Corrèze and turning a children’s hospital charity into a national institution, has died. She was 93. President Emmanuel Macron confirmed her death Saturday, saying he and his wife Brigitte had learned with “great sadness” of the passing of a woman who marked French history beside Jacques Chirac, who died in 2019, and changed the lives of millions of patients through her charitable work. “A great lady of the heart has departed,” Macron said. For more than half a century, Chirac was the fixed point in her late husband’s restless climb — through Parliament, two terms as prime minister, 18 years as mayor of Paris and, in 1995, the presidency. To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. Accept Manage my choices One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To …
Jospin, a defender of traditional parties, had criticized President Emmanuel Macron for making them obsolete and the French president’s “hubris” in a book published in 2020. Macron praised Jospin as “a great French figure” in a social media post Monday. “Through his rigor, courage and ideal of progress, he embodied a lofty vision of the Republic,” Macron wrote on X. Jospin, who successfully united the left camp during his tenure as the party’s leader in the 1990s and became prime minister in 1997, supported the left-wing alliance uniting the Socialists, the Greens and far-left France Unbowed during the 2022 legislative election campaign. But he cautioned against France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s disruptive political strategy shortly after the election, warning of its potentially destructive effects on the broader left in an interview with Le Monde. Jospin’s death was announced the morning after local elections that are setting the scene for the 2027 presidential race, at a time when the left is weakened by deep divisions among moderates over whether uniting with a dominant but increasingly toxic Mélenchon is inevitable — or …
All of this is very much out of Orbán’s election playbook, according to Michael Ignatieff, the former Canadian politician. He has observed Hungarian politics up close as professor of history at the Central European University, formerly based in Budapest, until it was forced out by Orbán, and is now headquartered in Vienna. “There’s always a risk you fall into a trap with Orbán. He’s fighting for his political life,” Ignatieff told POLITICO. But he doesn’t fault EU leaders for the stance they took last week. “I’m in no position to second-guess the Commission or the Council or anybody. The point to remember is that Orbán has run against Brussels Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday for 16 years and cashed the checks on Saturday and Sunday. That’s the play, right? I don’t think there’s anything the EU can do one way or the other here. If it plays soft, he’ll still play hard,” he added. Orbán’s four previous election campaigns were all built around the idea of Hungary facing a dark and dangerous external threat, …
