Tuesday November 3, 2009

Hit by legal woes, Chirac is back with memoirs

By Estelle Shirbon

PARIS (Reuters) - Jacques Chirac may be a powerless pensioner now, but the former French president's legal woes and blunt memoirs have momentarily knocked his hyperactive successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, off the front pages.

Former French President Jacques Chirac, seen in this February 9, 2007 file photo. Chirac may be a powerless pensioner now, but the former French president's legal woes and blunt memoirs have momentarily knocked his hyperactive successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, off the front pages. (REUTERS/Charles Platiau/Files)

Days after he was ordered to stand trial on embezzlement charges, a humiliation for a man who ruled France for 12 years, Chirac shot to the top of the news again on Tuesday after the first tome of his much-anticipated 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 been at loggerheads 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 of Giscard in his book, due out on Thursday.

"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 flattering write-up from Chirac even though they were ideological opponents and twice rivals for the presidency, in 1981 and 1988. Mitterrand won both times and it was only in 1995, after he stepped down, that Chirac became president.

"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 towards the end of the book and gets a mixed review.

"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.

But that is just the start of a long story. Sarkozy would go on to be a minister under Chirac, overshadowing the older man and conquering the presidency against Chirac's wishes.

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