After 40 years in politics, French President Jacques Chirac has spoken openly for the first time about his personal and public affairs, revealing that the biggest tragedy of his life has been his daughter's anorexia.

Chirac is not expected to seek a new mandate in this year's presidential election, and as retirement looms, the 74-year-old leader has given a series of unusually frank interviews that will be published in a book next week.

Extracts of "L'inconnu de l'Elysee" (The Stranger at the Elysee) were published at the weekend by Marianne magazine, with Chirac settling some domestic political scores, explaining his problems with America and damning economic liberalism.

Known for his discretion, he is especially candid about his family, notably the problems of his eldest daughter Laurence.

"There is no point in denying it ... it has been the drama of my life," Chirac says. "I had a daughter who was intelligent and pretty, and who was hit by mental anorexia when she was 15." Now aged 48, Laurence has still not recovered and needs 24-hour surveillance, he was quoted as saying.

Asked if he blamed himself in any way for her illness, Chirac says: "Perhaps not enough was done at the start, I don't know ... Perhaps I should have done more, psychologically speaking."

The president also alludes to his love life, rejecting suggestions in a recent book that he had planned to leave his wife for one of his lovers, but admitting an amorous past.

"Amorous adventures have not played a determining role in my life. There have been women I have loved a lot, as discreetly as possible," he says, without going into further details.

"I haven't hated women, but I have never abused them."

Chirac turned to author Pierre Pean to pen the book, the same man who gained the trust of late Socialist President Francois Mitterrand and wrote his biography.

The president praises his predecessor as a "very intelligent and cultivated man". From the extracts of the book, you could sometimes be forgiven for thinking Chirac was more of a Socialist at heart than a conservative.

Most of the political barbs are reserved for members of the center right, including former President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, who is portrayed as socially cruel, and former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, denounced as "vain".

Chirac also criticizes free-market economic liberalism and says globalization cannot last for long.

He singles out US firms and ideology for criticism.

"It is true that I find it hard to take the hegemony of firms like Coca-Cola and that I have permanently had problems with the Americans who always want to impose their point of view," he says, going on to denounce the US war in Iraq. "I told (President George W.) Bush 36 times that he was committing a monumental error," he says.

Talking about his own career, which has been marked by a series of sometimes bewildering zigzags, Chirac says he wants to be seen as someone who defended tolerance in France.

He reveals that he helped secretly finance the African National Congress during the apartheid years in South Africa, saying he felt physically sick by racism and anti-semitism.

Source: China Daily/Agencies