Paris (AFP)
"I was not always very disciplined, he was not always very nice, but maybe I did a lot of things to impress him": Nicolas Sarkozy returned Sunday, on his relationship with Jacques Chirac, whom he was close before becoming his rival.
"I loved it a lot, we fought a lot, we had thousands of memories together," recalled Nicolas Sarkozy, who met in 1975, only 20 years old, who was then prime minister of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and would become President of the Republic twenty years later, in 1995.
In the program "Vivement dimanche prochain" on France 2, Nicolas Sarkozy notably returned on May 16, 2007, day of the transfer of power between his ex-mentor, become a rival, and him, just elected president of the Republic . "Down the stairs, I told him + You realize + He said to me + You tutor me finally + + Yes, I told him, because I got there, there is no more reason than I want you. "
"I was appeased (...) the minute the French elected me president of the Republic," said Nicolas Sarkozy later. "Curiously, an anvil came out of me that day, and I thought, + It's done."
A long time collaborator of Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy had preferred Édouard Balladur during the presidential campaign of 1995, creating an irremediable fracture between the two men.
Monday, during the national tribute to Jacques Chirac, in the Saint-Sulpice church, "I said to myself, seeing his coffin: + Here, the only moment of equality in life is death +. And here we are all the same, there is no president, there is not poor, there is not rich, there is no big, small, we are all the same, "added the one who was president from 2007 to 2012 .
In his book that has just been published, "Here is Chirac", Jean-Luc Barré, author of Jacques Chirac's memoirs, reports some ferocious remarks by the former president, who regularly called Nicolas Sarkozy "the dwarf" or "the tiny".
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