As Minister of Economy and Finance, he implemented a liberal economic policy reminiscent of the one attributed to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

He thus implemented a major privatisation programme, involving several companies nationalised in 1945 and 1982, such as the Compagnie Financière de Suez, Paribas and the Société Générale.

He continued the economic policy he had undertaken in 1986 by carrying out new privatisations (notably Rhône-Poulenc, Banque Nationale de Paris and Elf).

Despite corruption affairs affecting some of his ministers, who he forced to resign (thus lending his name to the so-called "Balladur jurisprudence"), he had the support of influential media.

Balladur failed to win the elections for the presidency of the Île-de-France region in 1998, the RPR nomination for the mayoralty of Paris in 2001, and the Chair of the National Assembly in 2002.

Since the 1980s, he had advocated the unification of the right-wing groupings into a single large party, but it was Chirac who managed the feat, with the creation of the Union for a Popular Movement in 2002.

[4] Balladur is often caricatured as aloof, aristocratic, and arrogant in media, such as the Canard Enchaîné weekly or the Les Guignols de l'info TV show.

Incidentally, the percentage of French government ministers who were also members of Le Siècle peaked at 72% under Balladur's Prime Ministership (1993–95).

[5] Investigative forensic accounting enabled by the leaked Panama Papers revealed aspects of the Karachi affair, also dubbed "Karachigate", with the Ministry of Justice examining whether armament contract commissions paid by Saudi Arabia, then Pakistan, financed the 1995 presidential campaigns of Balladur or Chirac, whose administration then succeeded in taking office.

[6] In May 2017, Balladur and his former Defence Minister François Léotard were each charged, in relation to the Pakistan deal, with "complicity in misuse of corporate assets and concealment".