I was not a member of the RPR (Rally for the Republic), and who knows what possessed me to send a letter to “Monsieur Balladur,” addressed by post to some party office whose address I had somehow found. I don’t think I kept a copy of that letter, and one would have to rely on the efficiency of their archives to one day unearth what hadn’t already ended up in the shredder. I was highly disappointed by the long-awaited response: an envelope duly addressed to my name and address, containing a stencil-printed letter, the kind sent by the thousands with the same text. Édouard Balladur was hoping for several million voters: who knows how many he lost simply because his campaign team forgot to have him sign each automatic response with an authentic autograph.
It was 1994-1995, and the Gaullist party was expected to succeed the PS (Socialist Party), which had been in power for fourteen years. Except that the leadership of founder Jacques Chirac was no longer as indisputable, and his “friend of thirty years” had tasted power after skillfully managing his “cohabitation” (1993-1995) with François Mitterrand.
Édouard Balladur was first Secretary General of the Presidency for twelve years before being appointed to head a sovereign ministry, in a democracy where this choice is not just an arbitrary reward by the “will of the prince.” And another seven years before reaching Matignon. For the “certain idea of France” dear to General de Gaulle, did Édouard Balladur have a better profile than Jacques Chirac? His “Conversations with François Mitterrand” suggest that the then-President of the Republic, reaching the end of his two seven-year terms, thought so. But was it for Balladur or against Chirac, with whom the “cohabitation” (1986-1988) was not the most “republican”?
From that “certain idea” (but of France or of himself?), we will remember his “I ask you to stop” when his supporters interrupted his speech acknowledging his elimination in the first round of the presidential election to boo Jacques Chirac.
A resounding lesson in political science: the favorite in the polls is not necessarily the favorite at the ballot box, and a “representative sample” is precisely just a sample. The opinion of 1,000 people, by all possible methods, cross-checks, and projections, cannot draw the expression of 1,000,000 individuals.
During my law studies, at a time—twenty years after May 1972—when publications and periodicals had become rare, I was a regular at the “B.U.” (university library) where I discovered, among other things, old issues of “Le Monde,” whose association with reading constitutional “classics” would shape a strange familiarity—that of an intimate stranger—with the “prince-president,” the temptation of the Bonapartist expedient, the “republican monarch.”
That French political life was readable and intelligible to me. There were texts, first and foremost the Constitution; there were customs and habits that everyone liked to believe were republican; there was a political class and an administrative order often imbued with the same values and sharing a similar conception of principles: non-negotiable. Transcending it all, and even without saying it or claiming it through superfluous words, was a true love for the “dear old country.”
It is this “certain idea” thus structured, at least in its understanding at the time, that found an echo in the young man of a quarter-century. Unfortunately, thirty years later, it is still not possible for the old man he has become to recognize himself in the politics of his own country.
Nasolo-Valiavo Andriamihaja
Captured & Published at: 2026-09-04 05:38:57 (Madagascar Local Time EAT)
Original Source: https://www.lexpress.mg/2026/09/edouard-balladur-1929-2026.html