France's former president Jacques Chirac breaks four-year silence on Nicolas Sarkozy and mocks his successor in latest memoirs
France's former president Jacques Chirac breaks four-year silenceu00a0on Nicolas Sarkozy and mocks his successor in latest memoirs
Former French President Jacques Chirac has mocked his successor and party colleague Nicolas Sarkozy in memoirs covering his 12 years in office. Since handing power to Sarkozy in June 2007, Chirac had until now refrained from criticising the man who betrayed him in the mid-1990s and rubbished him in the run up to his presidential victory.
Bitter feelings: In his memoirs, Chirac claims that Sarkozy is bent on
"stigmatising, exacerbating antagonises and setting one category against
another. File Pic/Getty images
But in "The Presidential Time", which charts his 12 years in power from 1995 to 2007, the 78-year-old makes it crystal clear what he thinks of his fellow Right-winger. The two men, he says, don't "share the same vision of France". Rather than bringing people together, Sarkozy, he claims, is bent on "stigmatising, exacerbating antagonises and setting one category against another".
In extracts released to the French press yesterday, he gives a nod to Sarkozy's "boundless energy, and tactical and media skills", but brands him "nervous, impetuous" and disloyalu00a0-- the reason, he says, he never made him prime minister. The book's release next Monday comes less than three months before Chirac's trial on charges of illegal party funding while mayor of Paris.
In the memoirs, he claims that many corruption allegations against him were "founded on rumour, more or less orchestrated press campaigns" and "unscrupulously fabricated claims". He all but accuses Sarkozy of being behind at least one smear campaign in 1995, even if "I have always lacked proof that it was initiated by the budget minister (Sarkozy), as people assured me," he said. He says that as president he chose to rise above the "petty provocative phrases" Sarkozy aimed at him while in government.u00a0To react he says, would not have been "worthy of a president".
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In the past
Jacques Chirac is an avid fan of sumo and Japanese culture but Nicolas Sarkozy, the then French interior minister, described the wrestling as "combat between fat guys with lacquered ponytails". He added, "It is hardly a sport for intellectuals."
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