Chirac's past may return to haunt him

BILL CLINTON is tottering; Boris Yeltsin is wobbling. Will they shortly be joined in their woe by the industrial and democratic world's only other President with real power?

President Jacques Chirac has no bimbo problems; the French economy is doing fine. But there is an outside possibility that, in the next few months, Mr Chirac could become the first French President to be placed under formal examination for legal wrongdoing.

There is a constitutional problem, however. Under one reading of the French constitution, it is impossible for a president to face legal proceedings while in office, except for high treason.

A relentless judicial investigation of the finances of his neo-Gaullist party, the RPR, has been creeping closer to Mr Chirac for months.

Evidence unearthed yesterday by the investigative newspaper, Le Canard Enchaine, suggests that in the seven years before Mr Chirac became President in 1995, the RPR party machine was widely and illegally staffed by people who were paid for doing fictitious jobs at the Paris town hall and in private companies.

Mr Chirac was both president of the RPR and mayor of Paris at the time. Last month, Mr Chirac's long-time associate, the former prime minister, Alain Juppe, was placed under formal investigation - one step short of a charge - for his suspected role in the affair of the "emplois fictifs".

Since then, new evidence has come to light - including one scribbled note on a letter - which suggests that Mr Chirac knew as much as Mr Juppe about what was going on.

Le Canard Enchaine yesterday published a drawing of the RPR's headquarters in the Rue de Lille, in the chic 7th arrondissement, overlaid with arrows and bubbles.

The newspaper detailed the activities of 40 people who worked full-time for the party from 1988 to 1995, but who were paid either by the taxpayers of Paris or by private companies doing business with the Paris town hall. This amounted to more than half the staff of the RPR at the time.

Le Canard Enchaine estimates that the party was making an annual pounds 1m saving in salaries.

As head of both organisations, could Mr Chirac have remained aloof from and ignorant of such systematic cheating, as his supporters insist that he did?

According to press leaks, the magistrate in charge of the investigation (one of several overlapping investigations into the byzantine finances of the RPR) has almost as much evidence pointing to the involvement of Mr Chirac as he has against Mr Juppe.

Judge Patrick Desmure must decide whether he wants to bring a tidal wave of constitutional and political argument - and abuse - down upon his little office in the Paris suburbs by becoming the first magistrate to take a tilt at the head of state.

Everything turns on the ambiguous wording of Article 68 of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, which was copied more or less unchanged from previous constitutions. This states that the "President of the Republic is not responsible for deeds committed during the exercise of his functions, except in the case of high treason. He cannot be placed under accusation, except by the two Assemblies [National Assembly and Senate]."

Under one reading, this gives the President complete immunity from all legal proceedings, short of treason, while he is in office. On another reading, the immunity does not apply to anything that he did before he became President.

Although the French judiciary is nominally independent - and increasingly truly independent - the case also poses an awkward problem for Mr Chirac's political opponent but co-habiting Socialist, the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin.

The attitude taken by the justice ministry, under Mr Jospin's close ally, Elisabeth Guigou, could be crucial. Mr Chirac remains a popular figure in France; he remains, for all his fallibilities, the only convincing figure on the centre-right.

Will Mr Jospin be tempted to let him be embroiled in legal problems before the next presidential election in 2002? Or could that rebound against Mr Jospin and make the day-to-day relationship between Prime Minister and President untenable?