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JACQUES CHIRAC, 41, Premier. More than a year ago, Chirac, then Minister of Agriculture, went out of his way to praise Giscard as "one of the rare statesmen today." After Pompidou's death, Chirac brashly defied the party barons by scorning the official Gaullist candidate, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, and coming out openly for Giscard. Whether or not Chirac's defection contributed to Chaban's humiliating defeat at the polls, the barons were angrier than they have been at any time since Giscard abandoned De Gaulle in 1969.
"Jacques the Knife," as Chirac is now known in some quarters, is tall (6 ft. 2 in.), stubborn, impatient, ill-tempered at times—and unusually effective in getting things done. Born into a well-to-do Paris family, Chirac began his rise to power in 1962, when at the age of 30 he landed a job on the staff of Pompidou, then De Gaulle's Premier. Chirac's talents as a fixer and arranger made him indispensable to Pompidou, who fondly called him "my bulldozer." He included him in the small circle of staffers with whom he would share a cocktail at day's end.
After the student-worker upheavals of 1968, Chirac conducted some of the tricky negotiations with union leaders on labor reforms that ended the crisis. When Pompidou moved to the Elysée, he brought his bulldozer into the Cabinet as Agriculture Minister and later Interior Minister. Several years ago, Chirac observed that the chief function of a Premier in France is to "take responsibility for everything that is a bit disagreeable and difficult." Chirac has seldom expressed a firm conviction on any issue; he seems less interested in political abstractions than in the technical exercise of sheer power.
MICHEL PONIATOWSKI, 52, Minister of State and Minister of Interior. "Ponia," as he is known everywhere, is Giscard's closest friend and crony in or out of the government. A patrician with royal Polish ancestry—one of his forebears was a marshal in Napoleon's army—Ponia-towski has known Giscard since student days, and he is distantly related to Giscard's wife. He helped Giscard set up his Independent Republican Party in 1966. Well before Pompidou's death, Poniatowski had worked quietly to line up the centrist parties' support that proved so crucial in the election two weeks ago.
For years Poniatowski had been a vocal and witty critic of the Gaullist party, though it was a role that he found somewhat difficult to play after Pompidou named him Health Minister 14 months ago. He complained that the party's paternalism was becoming mere arrogance, that France itself was catching "the Gaullist disease, which is to live on the past, on traditions, on dogmas."
As Interior Minister, he will have a chance to practice what he has long been preaching about civil liberties. One reason for the quick action on wiretapping was the fact that Poniatowski's own phone, as he discovered to his rage one day last year, had been one of 5,000 that were routinely tapped by Interior Ministry eavesdroppers for years.