These days Chirac may like to compare economic liberalism with the horrors of communism, but here’s what he was saying in 1984:

“Liberalism seems to be working… Faced with a state machine that has become crazy, faced with a state bureaucracy that is growing monstruously, faced with an already difficult situation that will become even bleaker in the coming years, what will the next political leader be able to do, after the next election? He won’t have any other choice than liberalism. More to the point: liberalism won’t be a choice, but a necessity.”

Back then, of course, he was looking to win an election against the Socialist president Mitterand.

Times, quite clearly, have changed.

The reader in France who sent me that quote adds this:

“Let us not forget that Chirac in his youth was a communist, distributing l’Humanite, the French communist newspaper, on street corners. [He] is more of a “girouette” (wind vane) than Clinton ever was…”