Former French president Jacques Chirac has proved that revenge, particularly political revenge, is a dish best served cold.
More than four years after he left power — and 16 years after the two men first fell out — Chirac has issued a damning resume of his successor, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, describing him as “nervous, impetuous, bubbling over with ambition, doubting nothing, least of all himself.”
The attack on Sarkozy is made in the second part of the former leader’s memoirs to be published later this month. It veers from the subtle to the outright scathing.
In a surprising coup de grace, Chirac, now retired from politics, praises former Socialist party leader Francois Hollande, the man many on the French left believe is best placed to challenge Sarkozy in next year’s presidential election since the arrest of former IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn in New York.
Chirac has waited more than 15 years to retaliate over a series of alleged betrayals by Sarkozy, a man he had taken under his wing and who was romantically linked to his daughter Claude.
Bad blood between the two men goes back to the run-up to the 1995 presidential election when the young and ambitious Sarkozy abandoned Chirac to support his rival candidate, Edouard Balladur.
Chirac won, spending 12 years in office, but was forced to recognize Sarkozy’s popularity and appointed him to key Cabinet posts including interior minister.
Since Sarkozy’s election in May 2005 Chirac has maintained a dignified silence — until now.
In the 600-page The Presidential Time, Chirac praises the energy, tactical sense and media talents that made Sarkozy “one of the most gifted politicians of his generation,” but he goes on to write that he refrained from naming Sarkozy prime minister because he did not consider him “reliable enough” or sufficiently loyal.
Politically and economically, Chirac says, Sarkozy was too right-wing and “too American.” He criticizes his ability to “stigmatize, exacerbate antagonisms and set one category [of people] against another.”
He says it was “inappropriate” for Sarkozy to threaten to hose down the troubled Parisian banlieues (suburbs) and to call local youths racaille (rabble), sparking weeks of rioting across France.
“We probably did not share the same vision of France,” Chirac writes.
He hints that Sarkozy may have carried out a dirty campaign against him and claims to have been hurt by snide comments Sarkozy made about his well-known love of Sumo wrestling and Japan. By contrast, Chirac says, Hollande has the ability to act like a “true statesman.”
Among the more startling omissions in the book, the former president fails to address charges he faces later this month that allege he embezzled public money to fund his political campaign by creating fictitious jobs at City Hall when he was Paris mayor in the 1990s.
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