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| - Former president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who has died aged 94, shook up France's conservative post-war order in the 1970s but despite playing man-of-the-people was widely seen as elitist. The centrist leader, known to most French people simply as Giscard or VGE, was France's youngest president since Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte when he was elected in 1974 at the age of 48. He quickly ushered in a spree of radical reforms, legalising abortion, liberalising divorce and reducing the voting age to 18. Dubbed the "French Kennedy" for featuring his family in his campaigns, a novelty in France, he strove for a more relaxed style than his patrician predecessors Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou. VGE was seen in public playing soccer and the accordion. He also hosted African garbage collectors to breakfast on Christmas Day and invited himself, cameras in tow, to dinner at the homes of ordinary citizens. But his attempts to appear close to ordinary people failed to chime with his aristocratic bearing and often arrogant air. During a TV debate with opponent Francois Mitterrand in 1981, Giscard delivered what he thought would be a knockout blow by calling the Socialist "the man of the past". It was perennial politician Mitterrand who triumphed however and Giscard who suffered the ignominy of serving a single term. The defining image of Gisard thereafter would be him bidding the French a stiff "Goodbye" in a televised speech that ended with him getting up out of his chair and walking away while the camera was rolling. Born into a well-to-do family in the German city of Koblenz while it was under French occupation after World War I, Giscard was firmly part of the elite. Tall and slender and with an elegant manner, he studied at France's elite Ecole Polytechnique and the National Administration School, the finishing school for generations of French leaders. Aged just 18, he joined the French resistance and took part in the World War II liberation of Paris from its Nazi occupiers in 1944. He then served for eight months in Germany and Austria in the run-up to the capitulation of the Third Reich. He launched his political career in 1959, becoming finance minister in 1969. In 1966 he founded the Independent Republicans party, which eventually became the centre-right Union for French Democracy (UDF). During his seven years in power between 1974 and 1981, Giscard launched far-reaching infrastructure modernisation projects, like the high-speed TGV train, and committed France to nuclear power. An economic liberal with pro-US leanings, Giscard was also more outward-looking than his predecessors. He forged a powerful Franco-German alliance with Social Democratic chancellor Helmut Schmidt, with the pair spearheading the European Economic and Monetary Union that laid the groundwork for an eventual single currency. It was at his initiative that leaders of the world's richest countries first met in 1975, an event that evolved into the annual summits of the Group of Seven (G7) club. But his term was also buffeted by the 1970s shock rise in oil prices, rising unemployment and inflation. His reputation as a statesman was however tarnished by revelations that he had been gifted diamonds, while finance minister, from brutal Central African Republic dictator Jean-Bedel Bokassa. Giscard downplayed the value of the gems and said they were sold for charity but the scandal dogged him throughout his re-election campaign, which Mitterrand, whom he had beaten seven years earlier, won hands down. It was a blow to Giscard, who wrote in 2006: "What I feel, is not humiliation but something more serious: frustration at a job unfinished." He remained active in centrist politics, however, regaining a seat in the French parliament. He also served as a European parliamentarian (1989-1993) and in 2001 was selected by European leaders to lead work on the bloc's constitutional treaty -- which was then rejected by 55 percent of French voters. In retirement he gained a penchant for writing racy novels, including the 2009 "The Princess and the President" that recounts a romance between a French leader and a British princess. It was so evocative of the late Princess Diana that it sparked speculation about whether the pair had had a tryst. In 2003 he became the first former head of state to be named to the French Academy, reserved for the country's literary elite -- a recognition more of his writing in political and analytical books than his fiction. Giscard married Anne-Aymone de Brantes, the daughter of an officer in the French resistance who died in a Nazi concentration camp. The couple had two daughters and two sons. He last appeared in public in September 2019 at the funeral of Chirac in Paris. In May 2020, French prosecutors opened an investigation after claims by a German reporter that he had repeatedly touched her behind at his Paris office after an interview in 2018. But Giscard strongly denied the allegations, describing them as "grotesque". bur-jmy/br/sjw-cb/txw
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