World: Former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing dies of complications from the coronavirus

Former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing died at the age of ninety-four – announced the Elysee Palace on Wednesday evening. The politician was hospitalized for heart failure in November, according to a statement issued by his foundation, who died this Wednesday of a coronavirus complication at his home in Authon, Loire. According to his will, his burial takes place in a small family circle.

Born in 1926, Giscard d’Estaing led Charles de Gaulle under the chairmanship of the Ministry of Finance and, after thirty years, managed to balance the country’s budget.

The right-wing politician was elected president in 1974. As a representative of the centrist and Christian Democratic coalitions that rebuilt Europe after World War II, he fundamentally and permanently transformed French society with his policy of reform during his seven-year tenure. The presidency of a staunch European politician between 1974 and 1981 is linked to the modernization of French democracy and society.

During his tenure, the law on the right to birth control and abortion was enacted, the unification of primary education, the date of adulthood and the voting age were reduced from 21 to 18 years. As president, he called for the construction of the TGV (Train á Grande Vitesse), the high-speed railway, the development of the Minitel online service and supported the construction of nuclear power plants. In 1975, he began the creation of the world’s most advanced industrial nations (the current G7 group) and, together with German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, with whom Giscard, who spoke excellent German, had a personal friendship, embraced the plan of union monetary.

Throughout his life, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing worked to strengthen relations between European nations, successfully attempting to modernize political life and devoting his vast intelligence to the analysis of the most complex international problems.

– wrote about Nicolas Sarkozy, a former right-wing head of state, in his memoirs posted on social media.

France has lost a “statesman who chose to open up to the world,” another former president, the socialist Francois Hollande, said in a statement.

Valéry René Marie Georges Giscard d’Estaing was born in Koblenz, Germany, and his father was a civil servant in the French-occupied Rhineland after the First World War. He was the descendant of a rich aristocratic and political family, his great-grandfather was a minister and his grandfather was a member of Parliament. During World War II, he fought in the resistance movement, graduated in 1951 from the École nationale d’administration and began working in the tax office.

He was elected head of state at the age of forty-eight, founded the Republican Party in support of European integration in 1977, and in 1978 was founded by the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF).

However, the oil crisis, which is also affecting the French economy, rising inflation and unemployment are not really conducive to its popularity, as is its aristocratic subspecies, expensive skiing, hunting African elephants and his relationship with the Central African dictator, Emperor Bokassa. He also lost the support of his first prime minister, Jacques Chirac, who was running for president, and was defeated by left-wing candidate Francois Mitterrand in the 1981 presidential election.

However, he did not retire from politics, he was one of the strongest defenders of EU integration as a member of the European Parliament from 1989 to 1993, and from 2001 to 2003 he chaired the European Convention that draws up the EU Constitutional Treaty. . As a former president of the Republic, he has been a member of the Constitutional Council, the constitutional review body for French law, since 1981. He was elected a member of the French Academy in 2003, and since 2008 has been honorary president of the international organization Atomium based in Brussels.