Giscard d'Estaing, Valéry

French centre-right politician, president of France 1974–81. Committed to developing closer European unity, during his presidency he helped initiate the new Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1978 and direct elections to the European Parliament from 1979. He also introduced liberalizing social reforms, including divorce and abortion law reforms and reducing the voting age to 18. Faced with a worsening economy, in 1976 he brought in Raymond Barre as prime minister to manage a deflationary programme, but was defeated by the Socialist leader François Mitterrand in 1981. In 1984 he was re-elected to the National Assembly but resigned in 1989 in order to sit in the European Parliament. In 2002–03 he served as president of the Convention on the Future of the European Union, drafting a proposed new constitutional treaty pending the enlargement of the organization at that time to 25 states. However, its provisions were rejected in referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005.

In 1966 he founded the Independent Republicans party, a centre-right conservative party that worked in coalition with the Gaullists. He returned as finance minister 1969–74 under the Gaullist president Georges Pompidou. After Pompidou's death in office, he emerged as the right's candidate for the presidency and narrowly defeated the socialist François Mitterrand on a programme of social and political reform. In 1978 Giscard founded a broad-based centre-right confederation, the Union pour la Démocratie Française (UDF), and led it until 1996.