Jacques Chirac bade goodbye to the office of the French president but not the international spotlight on Tuesday night as he prepared to launch a private foundation to promote world peace.
After urging the country to unite and “respect diversity” in the last of his TV presidential addresses, he on Wednesday hands power and the codes to France’s nuclear weapons to his successor, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Standing in front of the French and European Union flags, Chirac delivered a sober appeal to France to rally together and not fragment, saying “a nation is a family” and France could be “motor for change” in the EU.
Both appeals recalled low points of his leadership: the 2005 riots that laid bare deep-rooted discrimination, and the French rejection of the EU Constitution that he had championed. His call for unity also appeared to respond to the divisive election campaign for his successor.
Chirac briefly expressed support for Sarkozy, his one-time protégé-turned-rival, who he said “at heart” wanted to take France into the future.
Despite Sarkozy’s pledge for a “clean break” with the Chirac years, the 74-year-old outgoing president is reluctant to exit the international stage.
In the autumn, he will launch his own Bill Clinton-style foundation to combat climate change and promote development and world peace, using his famed love of Asia, sumo-wrestling and African art to promote a “dialogue between world cultures”.
It will work in France and developing countries, mainly in Africa. Michel Camdessus, a former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who will run the project, told Le Monde Chirac had “deep convictions” and likened him to a “locomotive” who would use his foundation to “get things moving”.
Chirac, who has had one of the longest continuous political careers in Europe — twice president, twice prime minister and mayor of Paris for 18 years — will now move out of the comfort of state palaces for the first time in 30 years.
But while he is lauded for his resistance to the war in Iraq and reconciling France with its history by apologising for Nazi collaboration, Chirac has seen brutal appraisals of what critics call his wasted 12 years as the economy stagnated, public debt grew and youth unemployment and discrimination fed social unrest on housing estates.
In a survey last week, 54% said his time in power had been “bad” for France.
For weeks Chirac’s staff at the Élysée have been shredding personal notes and confidential papers. A special rubbish truck has destroyed miles of video and audio tapes.
Chirac and his wife, Bernadette, will move into a luxurious flat on Paris’s left bank, with a view of the Louvre, lent by the family of Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese politician assassinated in 2005. Over the past month, furniture movers and officials have been transferring papers, works of art and cases of wine into the building.
But when Chirac returns from a holiday in Morocco he could find decades-old corruption scandals returning to haunt him when his presidential immunity runs out in June.
Judges are said to be keen to question Chirac as a witness in an illegal party-funding scandal involving fictitious jobs, which claimed the scalp of his protégé and former prime minister, Alain Juppé. But an official in the ruling UMP party said Chirac, who denies all knowledge of several corruption rackets, was unlikely to face sanctions. — Guardian Unlimited Â