A dominant figure in French politics for four decades, Jacques Chirac, who has died aged 86, became president of France in 1995 at his third attempt. He was the fifth occupant of the post under the Fifth Republic. Previously he had been mayor of Paris and twice prime minister, yet, when he finally achieved the presidency, he proved to have little vision or particular determination, given the opportunities the voters had at last bestowed on him. He had campaigned on the fracture sociale (social divide) but did little if anything to bridge it. There were some positives, including his conspicuous opposition to the Iraq war, improvements to road safety and reform of military service, but at the end of his 12 years at the Elysée Palace (during his time there the presidential term was cut from seven years to five) it was hard to point to major reforms to a society that badly needed them.

He appeared to have neither the will nor the imagination to confront France’s problems, including those posed by powerful and immovable vested interests and by the public finances. His career ended under a cloud when, his presidential immunity lifted, a court convicted him of corruption during his years as mayor of Paris – when, among other things, his staff used public money to employ members of his own political party in bogus jobs. By then frail and suffering from memory problems, he was not in court to hear the two-year suspended sentence imposed on him in 2011.

Chirac claimed to be the political heir to Charles de Gaulle, who created the Fifth Republic, but his positions were so variable and inconsistent that he could have argued he was following in the footsteps of almost any postwar figure. His first presidency was blighted by a self-inflicted wound. Two years after his election, although his conservative allies had a parliamentary majority, he called an unnecessary general election, which the Socialist party and its allies won. There had been other instances of cohabitation (the situation under which the president and the prime minister, and so the government, come from different political families) but they had never lasted for more than two years. Chirac was stuck with the Socialist Lionel Jospin, whom he had defeated for the presidency in 1995, as prime minister for five years.

Lionel Jospin, left, and Jacques Chirac listening to a question during a press conference at the end of a French-German summit in Potsdam. Photograph: Jan Bauer/AP

His critics regarded him as an unprincipled and greedy opportunist, skilled in the politician’s arts of clientelism and betrayal but lacking any real conviction and indecisive in government. Even his political enemies, though, found it hard to dislike the affable Chirac, with his gargantuan appetite for Mexican beer and rillettes (pork) sandwiches, and there was little schadenfreude at his conviction. His defenders pointed to his intelligence, energy and adaptability, and to an authentic human warmth and generosity and breadth of culture that 40 years in the political jungle had failed to extinguish. Although he did not match François Mitterrand’s pharaonic works, he leaves at least one monument, the Quai Branly museum in Paris, which is dedicated to the indigenous arts and culture of non-European civilisations.

Chirac was capable of acts of great grace, as evidenced by what was perhaps the finest hour of his presidency – his admission of the responsibility of the French state in the Vichy years of 1940-44, so long and so shamefully denied – and by his moving and generous tribute to Mitterrand on the latter’s death in 1996. Unlike some of his political allies, he would have no truck with the far-right Front National, though its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, claimed, not unconvincingly, that Chirac had once asked for his support.

However, few impartial observers could fail to conclude that, during his 18 years as mayor of Paris, Chirac was a willing and active participant in a system of corruption that attained heroic proportions. His lack of loyalty was legendary. While he was far from being reflexively anti-American, his dream of a multipolar world led him to cultivate friendships with Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein and assorted generous African tyrants.

Son of Marie-Louise (nee Valette) and Abel-François, Chirac was born in Paris. His family had rural roots in the central French region of Limousin, and his grandfather had been a teacher in the département of Corrèze. Chirac always nurtured his family’s rural ties; farmers formed part of his natural constituency. Those roots were not, though, especially deep; his father was an aircraft company executive.

After a secondary education in Paris, Chirac took one of the elite’s classic fast tracks: Sciences Po (the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris), followed by the École Nationale d’Administration and the Cour des Comptes. He found time to take a summer course at Harvard. Military service, which he relished, took him to Algeria. He was a cavalry officer and a passionate supporter of “Algérie française”.

In the early 1960s, the energetic young Chirac caught the eye of Georges Pompidou, De Gaulle’s prime minister. He became a member of Pompidou’s cabinet and something of a protege of the rotund, worldly premier who was in many respects the polar opposite of De Gaulle. It is from this period that his nickname of le bulldozer, a tribute to his inexhaustible energy, is believed to date. Pompidou encouraged the young Chirac to add a political dimension to his technocratic activities, and he was duly elected a local councillor in Sainte-Féréole, Corrèze, in 1965. He won a parliamentary seat in the nearby town of Ussel in 1967 and held it for the next 25 years.

Jacques Chirac being welcomed by supporters in Ussel, where he won his first parliamentary seat in 1967. Photograph: Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

His government career began when Pompidou made him a junior minister in the social affairs department in 1967. The following year saw the civil unrest of the événements of May and June, and Chirac was closely involved in the negotiations that got France back to work; legend has it that on one occasion he attended a critical meeting with a gun concealed on his person. In 1969 De Gaulle resigned after losing an unnecessary referendum, and Pompidou became president. Chirac’s career flourished: middle-rank posts were followed by a spell at the agriculture ministry, where he established himself as the friend and defender of the paysan, and then the interior ministry.

In 1974 Pompidou died from a painful and lingering disease that had been hidden from the public. The obvious candidate to succeed him as president was the prime minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, a reformist, resistance hero and authentic Gaullist. In the first of a long series of coups de théâtre, arguing that Chaban-Delmas could not beat Mitterrand, Chirac led a group of 43 Gaullist deputies into the camp of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, champion of the centrists and the free-market, non-Gaullist right.

Giscard eliminated Chaban in the first round of voting and narrowly defeated Mitterrand in the second. Chirac was rewarded with the premiership. The relationship did not last long; Giscard had no intention of “inaugurating chrysanthemums”, as De Gaulle once put it, while Chirac ran policy. The president pushed through an ambitious series of social and economic reforms, not all of them to the taste of his political allies, and two years after his appointment Chirac abruptly resigned, claiming he was not being given the means to carry out his task.

At the end of 1976 he founded the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) – often described as neo-Gaullist, though the general would probably have been astonished by some of its positions – transforming the drifting and divided Gaullist movement into a machine to serve the personal ambition that would propel him to the Elysée. It also purported to defend Gaullist, nationalist and popular conservative values against the alleged Europhile and liberal policies of Giscard. The following year Chirac achieved another success when he shouldered aside Giscard’s candidate to become mayor of Paris – the post restored after more than a century in abeyance.

With the RPR at his disposal – over the years he was to beat off attempts by Gaullists more authentic than him to wrest it from him – and a power base in the Paris city hall, he resumed his trek to the Elysée. In 1981 he made his first presidential bid. He was easily beaten by Mitterrand and Giscard in the first round, but the right was split and Chirac endorsed Giscard in the final round with such an obvious lack of enthusiasm that many of his supporters abstained or voted for the left, and Giscard was beaten. Mitterrand called a general election, which was won by the Socialists and their allies.

During the next few years the divisions between the Paris city hall and the RPR became increasingly blurred as Chirac pursued his ambitions. In 1986 the swing of the political pendulum brought the right back to power in the national assembly and, for the second time, Chirac became prime minister: this was the first cohabitation. The new premier was no match for the crafty Mitterrand, who easily outmanoeuvred him. In 1988 Mitterrand and Chirac faced each other in the final round of the presidential election and Mitterrand was the easy winner, calling a parliamentary election, which was won by the left.

Jacques Chirac and François Mitterrand attending a European summit in The Hague. Photograph: Thierry Orban/Getty Images

Five years later the right again won a general election. After his experience in the mid-1980s, Chirac had no intention of spending two more years sparring with Mitterrand; his “friend of 30 years”, the fastidious and aloof Édouard Balladur, was appointed premier instead. It was clearly understood, at least by Chirac, that Balladur was a simple lieutenant and that le grand would step forward when Mitterrand’s second seven-year term ended and new presidential elections took place. It was yet another miscalculation; it took very little time for Balladur to discover that he, too, would like to be president.

At the start of 1995, Balladur was well ahead in the opinion polls and many of Chirac’s chief supporters had switched their support to him, including the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, eventually Chirac’s hyperactive successor, whom he came to loathe. But Chirac, a far better and more experienced campaigner, discovered the fracture sociale that had been apparent to most observers of France for some time. Arguing that a divided society had to be brought together, he attracted the support of many young voters, and in the first round, while finishing behind Jospin, he defeated Balladur. He narrowly beat Jospin in the second round.

The temptation for a newly elected president is to call an immediate general election, calculating that the voters will give him a sympathetic national assembly. Chirac did not, reflecting that the existing assembly had three years to run. Alain Juppé, a former foreign minister and long-time Chirac loyalist, was named prime minister. Various quasi-Gaullist policies, such as nuclear testing in the South Pacific, were resumed. But unpopular domestic policies and high levels of unemployment brought widespread strikes in the winter of 1995, Juppé became hugely unpopular and in 1997, instead of sacking him, Chirac called a general election, which the right lost. Jospin became prime minister.

After Chirac’s re-election in 2002 a general election returned the right to power in the national assembly. His reservations about the Iraq war won him applause at home and abroad but he suffered a major setback when in 2005 voters ignored his support for the planned European Union constitution, which was decisively rejected in a referendum by the electorate. The grandfatherly and archetypically provincial prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, was replaced by the patrician foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, whose speech at the UN opposing the Iraq war had been widely hailed. But plans to offer young workers lower pay to combat youth unemployment drew angry opposition and had to be withdrawn, while the death of two young men of immigrant origin in a suburban Paris housing estate after a police chase triggered nationwide riots, giving Sarkozy a chance to a parade his hardline credentials.

Chirac’s health deteriorated. He began wearing a discreet hearing aid and in 2005 he suffered a mild stroke. Increasingly he appeared to be little more than a spectator of the vicious Villepin-Sarkozy feud, and stepped down in 2007. In 2012 Chirac made it clear he would be voting for François Hollande, the socialist challenger and eventual victor, rather than Sarkozy.

Jacques Chirac delivering a speech while his wife, Bernadette, listens, at the Saint Quentin city hall, March 2002. Photograph: Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

In 1956 Chirac had married Bernadette Chodron de Courcel, daughter of a grand and wealthy Gaullist family. She was iron-willed, a devout Catholic and a product of the haute bourgeoisie. She had her own political career in Corrèze, and in the later stages of Chirac’s presidency emerged from his shadow as a political figure in her own right. They had two daughters, Laurence and Claude, the latter of whom became Chirac’s close adviser and a powerful figure in his inner court.

The marriage lasted but knew many vicissitudes. Chirac was serially unfaithful, as Bernadette acknowledged; his chauffeur recounted that his romantic encounters were more remarkable for their rapidity and frequency than their intensity.

He is survived by Bernadette and Claude. Laurence died in 2016.

• Jacques René Chirac, statesman, born 29 November 1932; died 26 September 2019