One challenger called President Jacques Chirac tired and old. Many French voters doubted the integrity of a leader tangled up in various corruption allegations. But in the end, the debonair president with a touch for the common citizen came through with a landslide re-election victory.
The 69-year-old Chirac on Sunday trounced extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, drawing on support from across the country s political spectrum.
"This represents a strong revival for our republic," said Jean-Pierre Raffarin, vice president of the center-right Liberal Democracy party and Chirac ally, on France 3 television.
Dapper, tall and charming, Chirac is a well-bred bon vivant who enjoys such trappings of power as luxury voyages abroad or life in a government-owned palace.
Heir to the conservative mantle of World War II hero Charles de Gaulle, Chirac has been a key figure of the French right since the mid-1970s, steadily advancing up the electoral ladder.
Overseas, he s seen as the consummate diplomat. The first head of state to meet with President Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Chirac won widespread praise for the sympathy he showed after flying over the ruins of the World Trade Center . "When you see that, you really want to cry," he said.
At home, his success with voters can be attributed to his gift for reaching out and touching ordinary people: no politician looks more enraptured when a farmer shows off his cow or appears more thrilled to kiss a baby.
"He is tired, old, the victim of a certain wear-and-tear," one challenger, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, said in March. But the next month, Jospin himself was knocked out of the race in the first round of presidential voting, and decided to retire from politics.
President Chirac, friends say, "is never better than when he is on the campaign trail."
But critics draw a portrait of a man with a credibility problem who uses his presidential immunity to hide from prosecutors trying to investigate numerous scandals that Chirac has been linked to.
"He says he wishes the law were different so he could testify before a court," Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former Socialist finance minister, said on national television. "But nothing forbids the president of the Republic from going to testify."
Investigators have suggested Chirac used hundreds of thousands of public dollars to pay for personal vacations for himself, his family and his entourage while he was Paris mayor in the early 1990s. In an explanation that raised more questions, Chirac said the money came from a special fund he was entitled to use as prime minister between 1986 and 1988.
Investigators are also looking into allegations that Paris City Hall under then-Mayor Chirac received millions of dollars in kickbacks in the 1980s and early 1990s, then funneled the money into political parties like Chirac s Rally for the Republic.
The only child of a well-to-do businessman, Chirac apparently had a lively youth. He was expelled from school for shooting paper wads at a teacher. He also sold the Communist daily "L Humanite" on the streets for a brief time, and even worked as a soda jerk at a Howard Johnson s restaurant in the United States , where, the story goes, he earned a certificate of merit for his outstanding banana splits.
But Chirac got more serious after serving in the Algerian war, and enrolled at France s Ecole Nationale d Administration, the elite training ground for the French political class. He was named prime minister for a first time at 41.
A personality clash with President Valery Giscard d Estaing led Chirac to resign, but he quickly plotted his comeback. He became mayor of Paris in 1977 and used the highly visible office as a power base to regroup.
In the 1981 and 1988 presidential elections, Chirac lost to Mitterrand, a Socialist, but his third try for France s top political prize proved the charm, and Chirac became president in 1995.
In a stunning political miscalculation in April 1997, Chirac dissolved his conservative government and called early legislative elections to boost his parliamentary majority. The gamble backfired, and the left swept to power, leaving Chirac largely a lame duck, unable to move his political agenda forward for the next five years.