PARIS - Former French president Jacques Chirac, suggesting a switch of political camps, said on Saturday he may vote for Socialist candidate Francois Hollande in next year's election.

Chirac, 78, conservative president of France for 12 years until 2007, said earlier this week he could not trust and had little in common with his conservative successor Nicolas Sarkozy, who is widely expected to run for a second term.

During a museum visit where Chirac and Hollande went on a good-humored walkabout together, the former president said 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, currently frontrunner in a contest to obtain the Socialist Party's backing for the election next April, played Chirac's comment down.

"He said it in jest. It was just to annoy his friends," he said. "He did it with a smile. I wouldn't read it as a declaration of intention."

Joke or not, other Socialists leapt on the comment from a former president whose remains a crowd-pleaser in old age.

"What this tells us is that a lot of French people do not want the Sarkozy option in 2012," Jean-Marie Le Guen, a Socialist member of parliament, told BFM television.

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".

Reuters