PARIS: French First Lady Bernardette Chirac said on Tuesday that President Jacques Chirac had apparently decided to seek a record third term in office.

And this, she suggests, largely because he wants to be able to place his own personal stamp on events and feels most uncomfortable with the present situation in which he finds himself _ that of a lameduck president who has his hands tied and feels he does not have much to say about the operation of the very government he has put into place.

Mr Chirac has even been heard complaining that his relationship with the Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is often much less comfortable than the arrangement of “cohabitation” (2002-2007) with a Socialist government, headed by Lionel Jospin.

Mr Chirac is known to regret not having won in a traditional runoff against a Socialist presidential candidate, which is why in recent months he has been reminding his ministers that they, like him, were effectively elected to represent all of the French, not only the one-half of the country that claims to identify itself with his party.

“There are at least 45 percent of the French,” he recently told an inquiring journalist, “who regularly vote on the Left, and I would like to be their president too.”

One of the reasons for announcing his objective of a third presidential term would be put to behind him the feeling that he is nothing but a lame duck president whose term in office will be up latest in the spring of 2007.

Jacques Seguela, the communications wizard and founder of the Euro RSCG advertising group who is credited with engineering Francois Mitterrand’s come-from-behind victory in 1981, recently expressed an opinion that Mr Chirac, whom he claims to meet regularly, would indeed be seeking a third presidential term.

Mr Chirac most recently contacted Mr Seguela with a view to interrogating him with regard to the victory he engineered on Dec 8 in Slovenia of that country’s new president Janez Drovneck - a victory that now allows Seguela to boast an incredible record of 16 victories in the 18 election campaigns where he has served as communications adviser.

It is conceivable, says an associate of Mr Seguela, that Mr Chirac may very well ask the RSCG founder to come up with a special campaign if the president decides to dissolve parliament with a view to giving himself a comfortable majority.