Emmanuel Macron is the fourth president of the French Republic to meet the Russian head of state. Among these, it was Jacques Chirac who established the most fruitful partnership with Vladimir Putin. But that was more than ten years ago.

A few days before the first meeting between Vladimir Putin and Emmanuel Macron on 29 May 2017, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated: "So far, the best relations have been with Jacques Chirac." Confirming what was reported by Jean-Pierre Raffarin, French Prime Minister from 2002 to 2005. "Macron? In any case it will be better ... But less well than with Chirac," said the Russian president at the Beijing summit devoted to" New Silk Roads "on May 14, 2017.

Recalling that Franco-Russian relations were beginning to erode during the second half of the Chirac presidency, Bruno Drweski, lecturer at the National Institute of Eastern Languages ​​and Civilizations asked by RT France, said: The President of the Russian Federation addressed the Gaullist image that Chirac had preserved rather than the reality of a leader who had not been able to face external and internal pressures aimed at the independence of France and its role between powerful and less powerful countries. "

Ten years after his departure from the Elysée, Jacques Chirac, last "Gaullian" President, remains in any case the standard by which Vladimir Putin will be able to evaluate the quality of his exchanges with the new French president.

It remains that the relations that had managed to bring Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin together was a small golden age between France and Russia. At that time, not only did the two leaders realize that the geopolitical interests of the two countries converged, but they also had mutual esteem for each other, and even affection.

read more:

https://francais.rt.com/international/38934-vladimir-poutine-jacques-chi...

“Many international problems cannot be resolved without Russia,” Macron said, as cited by TASS. He stressed the necessity of talking to Moscow at a news conference after the two-day meeting of G7 leaders in Sicily, which wrapped up on Saturday.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/389970-macron-russia-dialogue-problems/

Guillaume Poupard, the head of the National Cybersecurity Agency of France (ANSSI), said on Thursday there's no trace of a Russian hacking group being behind the attack on Emmanuel Macron's presidential election campaign.

According to him, the hack was “so generic and simple that it could have been practically anyone.”

RT:  Where does this statement by France's cybersecurity chief leave the claims of Macron's team on Russian hacking?

Annie Machon: It leaves rather a lot of egg on their faces. It appears that this attack was of such of low technical level it could have been done by a script kiddie from their mom’s basement. So rather than this hysteria about: ‘The Russians must have done it, the Russians must have done it,’ which reminds me to a certain extent of the Monty Python script that ‘you must always expect a Spanish Inquisition.’ It is beyond parody. We have a situation now where he was trying to make political hay. It seems to me that any establishment-anointed political candidate now wants to immediately say they are under attack by the Russians because it gives them credibility. It is just crazy.

Now, the one thing we do know from this is that the one country that actually has hacked the French election was the USA, and that was back in the presidential election of 2012 where they were not only intercepting the electronic communications, they were actually running human agents in the political parties. We know this because of disclosures through the Vault 7 cache that WikiLeaks put out a month or two ago. For everyone to go around blaming the Russians, when in fact the Americans have been doing this for years, is rather rich?

read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/390624-macron-hacking-election-russia/

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See also:

clapperama classic...

His chequered record in office is redeemed on account of one important action, the way he refused to support the illegal US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It’s worth remembering the wave of neocon-induced Francophobia that Chirac’s opposition to war unleashed. The French were labelled ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys.’ French fries were renamed ‘freedom fries.’ Racegoers in Britain were encouraged to boo French-trained horses at the racetrack. The Economist in October 2002 said, by way of condemnation, ‘So far Russia and France have been all too ready to explore any option but war.’ The utter scoundrels!

For French people living in the US and UK, and for Francophiles like myself, it was a difficult time.

But Chirac and France were fully vindicated by the stance which wasn’t cowardly but actually extremely sagacious. The ‘surrender monkeys,’ (whether or not they were cheese-eaters), were actually those in the US and UK establishments, and the leaders of the other countries who supported the attack, who backed George Bush and the hardline Washington neocons.

Writing in the Guardian on 12th February 2003, the late left-wing journalist Paul Foot  spoke for many in Britain when he said: “I confess I’m not a very patriotic sort of person, but this week I have suffered twice from the familiar combination of BBIV (blood boiling in my veins) and HUIN (hair standing up at the back of my neck) out of a sense of shame of my country and its government. I watched the television while Chirac, a rightwing President of France, and Putin, KGB apparatchik and prime minister [sic] of Russia, combined to talk plain common sense on the proposed American war on Iraq.”

Let’s suppose Chirac (and Putin), had been listened to on Iraq and the ‘plain common sense’ French-Russian line prevailed. Hundreds of thousands of innocent lives would have been saved. Not only those killed in the invasion and its bloody aftermath but those killed subsequently in Iraq and elsewhere by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL), which grew out of armed Sunni opposition to the US-led invasion.

The toppling of Saddam Hussein (and the dismantling of his deadly WMDs, which in fact did not exist), was supposed to make the world safer but the reality is that ‘Shock and Awe’ greatly boosted the cause of international terrorism. Iraq is still suffering from the invasion and of course there’s been spill-over into neighbouring Syria.

One of the most obscene things of all is how the architects of the Iraq War tried to blame France, a country which opposed it, for the invasion taking place. In 2005, that great ’Europhile’ and ‘Remain’ campaigner Tony Blair said the war was France’s fault for making it clear they would veto a Second UN Resolution.

Sir Stephen Wall, Blair’s former chief policy advisor, told a BBC documentary in 2007 that he remembers the precise moment, before the outbreak of war, when the British Prime Minister and his press chief Alastair Campbell (now editor of the pro-Remain New European newspaper) decided to play the anti-French card.

What a dishonourable tactic that was from those now telling us that Britain needs to maintain the closest ties with our European neighbours! As the French stated in their response, only four of the fifteen members of the UN security council supported a new resolution, so even if the Quai d'Orsay had keeled over to the war hawks, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The truth was that Chirac warned Blair in clear, unequivocal terms about the ‘disastrous’ consequences of invading Iraq and these warnings were arrogantly dismissed. Sir Stephen revealed that the British prime minister never paid any attention to what Chirac said. “He’d kind of come out rolling his eyes and say: ‘Oh dear, dear old Jacques, he doesn’t get it, does he?’…”

In fact, ‘dear, dear old Jacques’ did get it. Much better than dear, dear old Tony.

Let me end with a personal anecdote…

On the day that Nicolas Sarkozy won the presidential election to succeed Chirac, in 2007, I was a guest on a television chat show hosted by Dr Alan Mendoza of the neocon Henry Jackson Society. Mendoza was charming and made me feel very welcome and he seemed to be in a really upbeat mood. I’d like to think it was because he was getting the chance to meet me, but he couldn’t hide just how pleased he was that there would now be a change in France’s foreign policy away from what he saw as the Iraq War obstructionism of Chirac towards a more openly ‘interventionist’ one, fully aligned with Washington. 

He knew exactly what the end of Chirac’s rule meant and its wider significance. Repose en paix, Jacques Chirac.

Follow Neil Clark @NeilClark66 

Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. He has written for many newspapers and magazines in the UK and other countries including The Guardian, Morning Star, Daily and Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Week, and The American Conservative. He is a regular pundit on RT and has also appeared on BBC TV and radio, Sky News, Press TV and the Voice of Russia. He is the co-founder of the Campaign For Public Ownership @PublicOwnership. His award winning blog can be found at www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66

read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/469699-chirac-iraq-france-legacy/

Jacques Chirac is the one on the left of the cartoon at top...

The former president [Sarkozy] will be remanded in the investigation of the illegal financing of his 2012 campaign and the false invoices of Bygmalion.

Decryption and chronology.

This Tuesday, October 1, the High Court of Appeal confirmed the referral to the Criminal Court, of Nicolas Sarkozy for the excess spending of his 2012 presidential campaign revealed in the Bygmalion case.

After Jacques Chirac, suspended sentence in 2011 of two years in prison in the case of creating fictitious jobs when he was the mayor of Paris, this is the second time that a former head of state goes to trial under the laws of the Fifth Republic.

Here are the keys to understanding this case that has been poisoning the life of the former president since 2014.

Revealed in February 2014 by the magazine Le Point, the Bygmalion case takes its name from the company founded by two relatives of Jean-Francois Copé, and responsible for organizing the events of the election campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012. Investigators have unearthed a system of false invoices intended to allow the UMP [Sarkozy's political party] to provide about 18.5 million euros in unregistered illegal expenses, as part of the 2012 presidential campaign of his candidacy.

This huge fraud was intended to prevent these expenses to be included in the campaign budget and breach the authorized ceiling of 22.5 million euros, which, was officially exceeded as well. The campaign could have cost nearly 50 million euros.

Read more:

https://www.sudouest.fr/2016/02/16/affaire-bygmalion-quatre-questions-po...

Translation by Jules Letambour.

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Note: "sale trucs" = dirty tricks.

Attorney General Francois Molin announced the upcoming trial without specifying a date, but said the proceedings would take place in France’s Court of Justice of the Republic, a tribunal devoted to official misconduct. The country’s ex-defense minister Francois Leotard will also stand trial alongside the former PM. Both deny any wrongdoing.

The 90-year-old Balladur was initially charged in 2017 for “complicity in misuse of corporate assets and concealment” in relation to a 1994 submarine deal between Paris and Islamabad. Hoping to persuade the Pakistanis to purchase French vessels over British competitors, Paris arranged a regime of “commissions” and kickback payments for a litany of officials, lobbyists and other businessmen in both countries.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/470025-pakistan-balladur-submarine-scandal/

and:

“His recent obituaries are saying that Chirac got it right [on Iraq] and the rest of us got it wrong. But I am saying that Chirac’s motive for getting it right may not appear to be what it is,” Sir Richard Dearlove, who headed MI6 at a time when the UK government was assessing US intelligence before committing to the 2003 invasion, told the Mail on Sunday.

Chirac, who famously opposed the war drive by George W. Bush, leading to a diplomatic rift between the US and France, died on Tuesday aged 86. His funeral is scheduled for Monday (September 31).

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/469863-chirac-saddam-bribes-mi6/

Sour grapes from the Poms... MI6 — and of course dear Sir Richard Dearlove — would have had to know that the "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" mantra was a crock at the time. Is this crap coming from Sir Richard Dearlove a bit of payback, for Chirac having shown some sense, while the Poms and the Aussies got in deep in G W Bush's dirty arse? 

Read from top. See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31886