For many months before the 1995 French presidential election, Édouard Balladur, the incumbent prime minister, seemed certain of victory. Opinion polls consistently gave him a lead over his conservative rival Jacques Chirac, and the main leftwing candidate. But, as other politicians have discovered, polls can be misleading and voters change their minds. When the ballot papers were counted it was Chirac who won and succeeded François Mitterrand as president.
The defeat of Balladur, who has died aged 97, was due partly to his lack of appeal to young voters, a consequence of his public image which, somewhat unfairly, was that of an aloof aristocrat. When he first became a minister, the satirical weekly newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné dubbed him “his courteous self-importance” and Le Monde’s cartoonist Plantu depicted him as a bewigged 18th-century nobleman being carried around in a sedan chair. His manner and style – three-piece English tailored suits, dislike (figuratively and literally) of getting his hands dirty and obvious distaste for close personal contact – did not play well in the context of a presidential contest.
