MAN OF THE HOUR, AT LAST

By THOMAS SANCTON/PARIS

On a cold night in Rouen this February, Jacques Chirac slumped into the back seat of his Citroen and opened a Heineken. Chirac is the conservative mayor of Paris and a former Prime Minister of France; he was running for the French presidency and had just delivered a 90-minute speech. He was bone tired. Nevertheless, the long day of handshaking and backslapping buoyed his spirits. "I have always campaigned close to the people," he said. "I am a man of contact." Chirac had an added reason for satisfaction: on that night, for the first time since he officially entered the race in November, his poll numbers were improving. "I never doubted this rise would come," he said. "I have been preparing for a long time."

A very long time, and his preparations have finally borne sweet fruit. Last Sunday, after a tough come-from-behind campaign and a nail-biting finish, Chirac, 62, defeated the Socialists' candidate Lionel Jospin by a comfortable margin. He will thus succeed Socialist Francois Mitterrand, 78, whose second seven-year term ends on May 20. For a man who had lost presidential bids in 1981 and 1988-and who seemed to have been eliminated from this race only a few months ago -- it was an extraordinary personal vindication.

Not everyone would envy Chirac his prize, however. France today is a country suffering from severe social unrest and political alienation. The unemployment rate is 12.2% -- one of the highest of any major industrialized nation. The army of 3.3 million jobless contributes to a growing gap between the rich and poor, stirs antagonism against the large immigrant community and sustains an underlying sense of insecurity and fear of the future. During the campaign thousands of striking workers, students, homeless people and aids activists jammed the streets of Paris and other large cities.

So many voters are disaffected that one opinion poll taken before the election indicated that 61% of respondents didn't think it would make any difference at all who won the presidency. Where there is not apathy, there is ominous extremism. In the first round of the election held on April 23, nearly 40% of the ballots went to fringe candidates ranging from the Trotskyites to the harshly anti-immigrant Jean-Marie Le Pen, who won 15% of the vote, a record for him. Chirac's task now is to heal the wounds of a bruising campaign, restore public confidence and spark a job-creating burst of economic growth.

Is he up to it? If success depends on sheer exuberance and tenacity, he has a better than even chance. The son of a schoolteacher-turned-banker from the southwestern region of Correze, Chirac ran away from home at 17 and spent several months in the merchant marine. When he was 20, he studied at Harvard summer school, washed dishes at a Howard Johnson's in Boston, and became engaged (briefly) to a girl from South Carolina who had a white Cadillac convertible and called him "honey chile." He retains a strong affection for America and is in fact an American junk-food addict. "When you're in the U.S. with Chirac," says Foreign Minister Alain Juppa, "there's always a problem: as soon as he sees a fast-food place, he has to stop the car, rush up to the counter and order a hamburger." (Chirac does have a more sophisticated side-he speaks Russian and is an expert on Chinese poetry and porcelain.)

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.

With the U.S., Chirac will be a tough-minded ally. "Franco-American relations have been, and always will be, both conflictual and excellent," he says. "The U.S. finds France unbearable with its pretensions; we find the U.S. unbearable with its hegemonism. But deep down, we remember that the 'boys' came to help us two times, just as the Americans remember that the French helped them win their independence. So there will be sparks but no fire, because a real bond exists." The sparks, Chirac predicts, will come on "trade issues-we won't give one inch on culture and agriculture-but on the really essential things there is no problem."

During the campaign, Chirac accurately described a "social fracture" in French society. Whether his contradictory program will actually lower unemployment is an open question, but Chirac himself may offer something that will help heal that fracture. Unlike the monarchical Mitterrand or the dry Jospin or the hatemongering Le Pen, he has empathy, gregariousness, heart. One thing the alienated French may require from their politicians right now is "contact"; Chirac is the one to provide it. --With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris