MAN OF THE HOUR, AT LAST

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Chirac attended the alite Ecole Nationale d'Adminstration, as did Jospin, and entered government in 1962. He was Prime Minister from 1974-76 and from 1986-88. After he lost the presidential race for the second time, he vowed that he would never run again while serving as Prime Minister. That was why he asked his old friend Eduoard Balladur (yet another e.n.a. graduate) to take that office after the conservatives' parliamentary landslide in 1993. But Balladur broke a promise and decided to run for President himself. For much of the past year, the traitor -- to Chirac partisans -- had a huge lead in the polls.

Advised mainly by his daughter Claude, 32, Chirac pursued an energetic grass-roots campaign. He crisscrossed the country, shaking hands, kissing babies, meeting local groups and offering somewhat populist programs. He caught up with the more aloof Balladur and passed him, but in a shocking result, Jospin won the first round of the election. Chirac has never been known for his consistency, and having tacked left to defeat Balladur, he nudged more to the right for the final round to woo the Le Pen voters. He began hammering on issues like law- and-order and the fight against the legacy of socialism. Now Chirac must achieve something in the office he has sought so eagerly for so long. Most important, he must address unemployment. It is a stubborn problem: France has recovered from the global recession of the late 1980s and early '90s much more slowly than the U.S. or most of its European neighbors. Having automated heavily in the '80s, moreover, France has a high level of structural unemployment that is aggravated by rigid labor laws and an expensive social welfare system. Chirac says he will offer employers a two-year exemption from payroll taxes and a $400 per month stipend for every long-term unemployed worker they hire. He pledges to lower income taxes and inheritance duties on businesses, exempt reinvested profits from taxation, and promote wage hikes to encourage consumption. "A franc put into a worker's pocket is not a franc taken out of the economy," he says.

At the same time, Chirac intends to revamp the educational system and maintain the country's generous network of social and health benefits. When asked how he can simultaneously lower taxes, subsidize employment and boost salaries while cutting a $92 billion public deficit, Chirac likes to respond with an aphorism: "Politics is not just the art of the possible, it is sometimes the art of making possible what is necessary." Specifically, he has called for a major audit of state spending to identify and eliminate waste. He also intends to use proceeds from privatization to draw down the national debt. But he is mainly hoping for a sharp upturn in economic growth, now running at a modest 2.6% annually, to generate more jobs and tax revenues.

If his domestic program is a bit of a hodgepodge, critics would say that Chirac is most opportunistic when it comes to European union. After zigging and zagging sharply several times since 1978, last March he embraced the "complete realization of economic and monetary union" with "the Franco-German couple at its heart." Then, just days before the final vote, in what opponents said was an attempt to appeal to the right, he retraced his steps and called for a referendum on a follow-up to the pro-union Maastricht treaty.