Jacques Delors renounced the 1995 presidential election for these two reasons – The HuffPost

Francois Lenoir via Reuters

POLICY – It all happened on a piece of paper divided in half. A column for “for” and a column for “against”. In a long interview published by Point, Thursday, November 4, the former president of the European Commission Jacques Delors, 96 years old, reversed his surprising renunciation of the presidential election of 1995, whereas he was the favorite of the left and of the Socialist Party.

The year before the election, polls predicted a victory for the former finance minister in almost all configurations against the right-wing candidate, including Jacques Chirac, who will be finally elected with 52.64% of the votes against Lionel Jospin, on May 7, 1995.

A night of nightmares

At Point, Jacques Delors explains that, two days before the official announcement of his renunciation on the set of “7 sur 7” in December 1994, facing Anne Sinclair, he had scribbled on a sheet of paper two columns to list the arguments for and against a candidacy.

“When I went to bed, the favorable column had one more argument. I had a very bad night, restless, indecisive and filled with nightmares. In the early morning, I added two arguments to the right column … ”, he says.

Two other reasons indeed came to the mind of the former Minister of the Economy and were added to the column of “against”. “I considered that part of the PS would not support me as much as it should. The second is that this situation risked preventing me from acting as I thought was good for France ”, he concluded, thus signing, for all intents and purposes, the beginning of the end of a long political career.

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