Embattled Chirac lets fly in his memoirs
Source: Agencies |
November 4, 2009, Wednesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
JACQUES Chirac may be a powerless pensioner now, but the former French president's legal woes and blunt memoirs have momentarily knocked hyperactive successor Nicolas Sarkozy off the front pages.
Days after he was ordered to stand trial for embezzlement, a humiliation for a man who ruled France for 12 years, Chirac shot to the top of the news again yesterday after the first tome of his memoirs leaked to the press.
Readers looking for nuggets of nastiness against Sarkozy, whom Chirac disliked and tried for a time to block from the presidency, will have to be patient as the first volume stops in 1995, well before Sarkozy's rise to power.
But Chirac, 76, looks to settle some older scores, notably against another former president, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, 83. The pair are from the same centre-right political camp, but they have clashed for decades.
"One day, Giscard had told me he had thrown his resentment towards me into the river, but the river must have been dry that day as his rancour has remained strong and seemingly endless," Chirac writes in his book, due out tomorrow.
"Yet in a democracy, one man's defeat is rarely an irreparable loss," he adds, according to Le Parisien.
This was a reference to the 1981 presidential election, when Giscard stood for a second term and Chirac ran against him, splitting the right-wing vote and, according to Giscard, handing victory to the Socialist Francois Mitterrand.
Surprisingly, the late Mitterrand receives the most praise from Chirac even though Mitterrand twice beat him to the presidency. "The man I got to know during our meetings had excellent judgment and a tactical intelligence that I have rarely encountered in political circles," Chirac writes of Mitterrand.
A young Sarkozy makes his first appearances toward the end of the book.
"He had an iron will, which has not changed, to make himself indispensable, to always be visible. He was nervous, he would fuss over me, he was impatient to act and undeniably had a talent for generating publicity," Chirac writes of Sarkozy.
More on that is expected in volume two.
Days after he was ordered to stand trial for embezzlement, a humiliation for a man who ruled France for 12 years, Chirac shot to the top of the news again yesterday after the first tome of his memoirs leaked to the press.
Readers looking for nuggets of nastiness against Sarkozy, whom Chirac disliked and tried for a time to block from the presidency, will have to be patient as the first volume stops in 1995, well before Sarkozy's rise to power.
But Chirac, 76, looks to settle some older scores, notably against another former president, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, 83. The pair are from the same centre-right political camp, but they have clashed for decades.
"One day, Giscard had told me he had thrown his resentment towards me into the river, but the river must have been dry that day as his rancour has remained strong and seemingly endless," Chirac writes in his book, due out tomorrow.
"Yet in a democracy, one man's defeat is rarely an irreparable loss," he adds, according to Le Parisien.
This was a reference to the 1981 presidential election, when Giscard stood for a second term and Chirac ran against him, splitting the right-wing vote and, according to Giscard, handing victory to the Socialist Francois Mitterrand.
Surprisingly, the late Mitterrand receives the most praise from Chirac even though Mitterrand twice beat him to the presidency. "The man I got to know during our meetings had excellent judgment and a tactical intelligence that I have rarely encountered in political circles," Chirac writes of Mitterrand.
A young Sarkozy makes his first appearances toward the end of the book.
"He had an iron will, which has not changed, to make himself indispensable, to always be visible. He was nervous, he would fuss over me, he was impatient to act and undeniably had a talent for generating publicity," Chirac writes of Sarkozy.
More on that is expected in volume two.
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