Word: chirac
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tradition of fratricide. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, president of the governing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), has the support of a vocal majority among his party's parliamentarians, and his popularity among conservative voters dwarfs that of any other possible contenders on the right. But President Jacques Chirac doesn't like him. And as many slain rivals have learned, Chirac can be a deadly enemy...
...Chirac has plenty of reasons to have an aversion to Sarkozy. The younger man turned on the president before the elections of 1995 and backed a rival, Edouard Balladur, who then faded as Chirac rebounded and won. Sarkozy preaches a "rupture" with France's recent past, over most of which Chirac has presided. Sarkozy even went to Washington in September to meet with George Bush and criticized the "sterile grandiloquence" of France's 2003 rejection of the invasion of Iraq - which marked the apogee of Chirac's now dimmed popularity...
...organization was in the thick of it - tended to ignore the glaringly obvious fact that the purists' favorite son, former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, got clobbered in the last presidential elections in 2002. The Socialists finished third in that election, forcing them to throw their support behind conservative Jacques Chirac in the second round in order to keep out the right-wing xenophobe Jean-Marie Le Pen. Still, until the results emerged just before midnight on Thursday at the party's shabby-chic headquarters on the left bank's rue de Solf?rino, many Socialist leaders had hoped...
...that they have announced a clutch of new policies meant to lessen the tax burden, loosen up labor rules, and set free the largely frustrated entrepreneurial spirit of the French people. Sarkozy's talk of a "rupture" with the past has engendered plenty of ill will among the pro-Chirac traditionalists of his party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). But there is scant prospect that anyone can challenge him for the party's candidature, especially now that the Socialists appear to have rallied behind a single candidate...
...leader of the far-right National Front, in a recent poll gauging attitudes in the run-up to the April 2007 presidential elections 9% Le Pen's popularity in the same period before France's 2002 elections, when he shocked Europe by coming in second to President Jacques Chirac...