Édouard Balladur

Biography

Édouard Balladur was born in İzmir, Turkey, in 1929 into a Levantine family of Armenian descent with long-standing ties to France; the family settled in Marseille in the 1930s. He studied at Aix-Marseille University and Sciences Po and graduated from the École nationale d'administration in 1957.

He entered public life in 1964 as an adviser to Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, followed him to the Élysée as under-secretary-general and served as secretary-general of the presidency from 1973 until Pompidou's death in 1974. He then worked in business, heading the French Mont Blanc Tunnel company and later the computer services firm Générale de Service Informatique.

A neo-Gaullist close to Jacques Chirac, he devised the idea of cohabitation and served as minister of state for the economy, finance and privatisation from 1986 to 1988, launching a large privatisation programme. When Chirac declined the premiership after the right's 1993 election victory, Mitterrand appointed Balladur prime minister. His government continued privatisations and backed French forces in Rwanda during the genocide.

Breaking an understanding with Chirac, he ran for president in 1995 and finished third. He sat in the National Assembly until 2007, chaired its foreign affairs committee and in 2007-2008 led Nicolas Sarkozy's committee on institutional reform, which produced the constitutional revision of July 2008. Charged in 2017 over alleged kickbacks to his 1995 campaign from Pakistani arms deals, he was acquitted by the Court of Justice of the Republic in 2021. He died in Paris in August 2026, aged 97.