Chirac gives pledge on economy

A SUBDUED President Jacques Chirac told voters yesterday that it would take time and adaptation for France to recover from an…

A SUBDUED President Jacques Chirac told voters yesterday that it would take time and adaptation for France to recover from an economic slowdown. In a Bastille Day television interview, Mr Chirac said there was no miracle solution to France's problems.

He said he understood the prevailing mood of gloom about everything from the economy to health risks in asbestos and mad cow disease, but he was determined to get the country moving.

"I am well aware there is a profound anxiety at present in the hearts and minds of the French people," the President said, adding that Prime Minister Alain Juppe's unpopular centre right government was doing its best in difficult circumstances.

Mr Chirac said voters should start to see the first fruits of deficit cutting in September, when the government draws up a 1997 budget which would include the first tax cuts.

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Mr Chirac, who reviewed the annual Bastille Day military parade with visiting South African President, Mr Nelson Mandela, called for a cut in French and German interest rates.

An Opposition Socialist party spokesman, Mr Francois Hollande, said the President had failed to respond to people's anxieties by vowing to plough on with the same policies and blaming the independent Bank of France for failing to cut rates.

In response to discontent with a perceived focus on foreign policy in his first year in office, Mr Chirac spent the entire interview on domestic issues referring to his trips abroad only as a way of winning job creating contracts for French industry.

He vowed to disarm separatist gunmen and put an end to Mafia style violence in Corsica and pledged that justice would be applied equally to all in the current wave of corruption scandals.

He did not reply directly when questioned about a probe into alleged kickbacks at the Paris housing authority to finance his Gaullist party while he was mayor, nor to the granting of cheap city owned flats to cronies and relatives, including the son of his successor, Mr Jean Tiberi.