French former president Jacques Chirac backtracked on Sunday after saying he would switch sides to vote for a left-winger in next year's election, according to Reuters. Chirac issued a statement to say he was just having fun when he said on Saturday he would back Socialist candidate Francois Hollande and that his remarks had been misinterpreted. That failed to stop some adversaries seizing on those remarks. The far-right National Front party pounced on it, saying it proved there was no difference between the leading political parties, an angle of attack the National Front regularly uses in an effort to establish itself as a true alternative. "This confession more than ever shows the need for Marine Le Pen's presidential election candidacy," Steeve Briois, National Front secretary general, said in a statement. One opinion poll published on Saturday suggested Hollande or Socialist Party chief Martine Aubry would trounce conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy in next year's election. A second on Sunday suggested, as others have in the past, that Le Pen could beat Sarkozy in the first round to make it into a runoff against a Socialist. Some left-wing politicians said Chirac was joking but others such as Segolene Royal, who lost the 2007 presidential contest to Sarkozy, said there was more to it than humour. "I think there's a feeling on the right, that there is going to be a serious change in 2012," she told Canal Plus television. Bruno Le Maire, farm minister in Sarkozy's conservative government, sought to play down Chirac's comments. "I can testify to the differences of view and understanding between Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy on a certain number of issues," he said. "But it should not be overinterpreted." In published extracts of a memoir he is due to publish this month, Chirac described an occasion where Hollande had behaved like a "true statesman". He described Sarkozy as "nervous, impetuous, dripping with ambition and with no doubts about anything, and above all about himself". The 78-year-old Chirac, conservative president of France for 12 years until 2007, made the comment that started the debate during a museum visit on Saturday where he and Hollande went on a good-humoured walkabout together. In visibly playful mood, Chirac said that he would plump for the left-winger unless an old friend, Alain Juppe, currently foreign minister under Sarkozy, were to run for president. "I can say I would vote for Hollande," Chirac said. A beaming Hollande played Chirac's comment down at the time, saying: "He said it in jest. It was just to annoy his friends."
