Mourning in France: former president Giscard d’Estaing is dead

Former French head of state Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the center politician, who served at the Elysée Palace from 1974 to 1981, has died at the age of 94, as reported Wednesday evening. French news agency AFP, citing those surrounding the former president. The former president was discharged from the hospital in Tours, western France, only in the middle of the month after a five-day hospital stay.

The former president died Wednesday at his home in the central French department of Loir-et-Cher due to an illness from Covid 19, according to a statement made available to the dpa. The funeral should take place in the family circle. No appointment was made.

Giscard d’Estaing was a staunch European and spoke to the French public about EU affairs until old age. In the 1970s he formed an exemplary Franco-German duo with then Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (SPD).

The tall Frenchman with aristocratic demeanor outlived his successors François Mitterrand (1916-1996) and Jacques Chirac (1932-2019). At the funeral service for Chirac in September 2019 in Paris, he still attended – walking bent over.

Giscard d’Estaing also had a close personal relationship with Germany. He was born on February 2, 1926 in Koblenz, in the then French-occupied Rhineland. After the Second World War he graduated from the French elite university ENA. He then rose to become Minister of Economy and Finance. After the death of President Georges Pompidou, he was elected to the highest state office at the age of 48.

Giscard has implemented social reforms such as the liberalization of the law on marriage and abortion in the Elysée Palace. Towards the end of his tenure, however, his popularity suffered, among other things due to the affair surrounding a diamond gift from Central African dictator Jean-Bédel Bokassa.

From 2002 onwards, Giscard led the EU Reform Convention, which presented a draft constitution for the renewal of the European Union. However, when the French and the Dutch voted no in the referendums in 2005, the project failed spectacularly. Subsequently, the EU Treaty of Lisbon adopted important provisions of the rejected constitution. In 2003 the European politician Giscard d’Estaing received the Charlemagne Prize of the city of Aachen.

Giscard d’Estaing responded to a sexual harassment allegation against him in June. “It’s all grotesque,” he told French radio station RTL. A WDR reporter accused him of sexually assaulting her. Ann-Kathrin Stracke told the German news agency that she “touched her buttocks several times after an interview I conducted with him in Paris in December 2018”. He confirmed that he had filed a criminal complaint for sexual harassment. The Paris prosecutor has opened an investigation.