Adopted girl defends Jacque Chirac
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-07-22 10:10

A Vietnamese girl adopted by Jacques Chirac when he was mayor of Paris gave the French president a glowing personal testimonial on Wednesday.

French President Jacques Chirac holds up his hand on arrival at Gleneagles Hotel for the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, July 6, 2005. [Reuters]

"I was crying in a corner of the airport when a tall man approached and said, 'Don't cry, my dear. From now on, you'll live with us,'" Anh Dao Traxel said in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper. Traxel had just arrived in Paris from Viet Nam. The man was Chirac, then mayor of Paris.

"He's a man of heart," Traxel said of the man she calls her "second father."

After fleeing her native Viet Nam by boat, the then 20-year-old Traxel spent seven months in a refugee camp before escaping to Paris in 1979.

"It was a fairy tale," the 47-year-old Traxel said of the "two marvellous years" she spent in Paris's sumptuous city hall, which also serves as the residence of the mayor.

Never formally adopted by the Chiracs - her biological parents subsequently joined her in France - Traxel said she always considered Chirac and his wife, Bernadette, as "my second parents." She said her own children called Chirac, Papy, the French equivalent of Grandpa, and Chirac Mamy.

Traxel's revelations could not come at a better time for Chirac. He has suffered a string of political setbacks culminating in the French rejection of the EU Constitution and the loss of the 2012 Olympics to London.

His main political rival, his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has lost no opportunity to taunt the president.

But after Sarkozy organized a Bastille Day party to coincide with Chirac's own reception, presidential loyalists hit back. Jean-Louis Debre, a Chirac ally and senior member of the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), accused Sarkozy of challenging Chirac's authority. "Our duty is to pull together, to unite," he said.

Chirac's political troubles do not appear to worry Traxel. "When he stumbles he always gets back up," she said.

Asked whether she thought that Chirac, who is 72, would seek a third term in the 2007 presidential elections, Traxel said: "Given his character, I cannot imagine that he'll stop, pick up a fishing rod and retire. I think that he'll fight until the end."

Traxel, who had previously kept silent about her time with the Chiracs, said she had decided to go public by publishing a book next February. "I always thought that my story only concerned the Chiracs and me," she said. "But finally, I felt the need to tell my story to show my gratitude to the Chiracs."

Traxel was not the only one vouching for Chirac's character this week. Chirac's wife gave an interview to Paris Match magazine in which she praised her husband's tenacity and said he would make a decision about the 2007 election when the time came.

"I've never seen my husband depressed, because he's a fighter," she said. "He will fight to the end."

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