Former US President Jimmy Carter has gone to home hospice care after several short hospital stays. This was announced by the Carter Foundation, founded by the former president, on its website on Saturday. Accordingly, the 98-year-old has decided not to seek any further medical treatment. Instead, he wanted to spend the remaining time at home with his family.

In recent years, the aged ex-president had to struggle with health problems. In 2015, he had to undergo radiation treatment for a brain tumor — and defeated the cancer.

The US must now prepare to bid farewell to the former president. His grandson, Jason Carter, said Saturday that he had seen his grandparents the day before. "They are at peace and their house is, as always, full of love."

Carter is the oldest living former U.S. president. The Democrat was the 1977th President of the United States from January 1981 to January 39. He served only one term. He was succeeded by Ronald Reagan.

Although Carter is considered a hapless US president, he has been repeatedly honored in recent decades as the "best former president" of the country. The Democrat was only 56 years old when his political career lay in ruins after the ignominious recall in 1980. At the time, Carter had a reputation as an unworldly idealist, a failed statesman without political assertiveness. On his ideals, however, he built a second career as a tireless fighter for peace and human rights, which was crowned with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Positioning as an outsider

Carter was born on October 1, 1924 in Plains, Georgia. After high school, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and served as an officer in the submarine fleet. At this time he also married his wife Rosalynn, together they had four children. After his father's death, the devout Baptist returned to Georgia in the early 1950s and took over the family's peanut farm.

Carter eventually entered politics, was elected to the Georgia Senate in 1962 and governor eight years later. Although initially little known at the national level, he secured his party's candidacy in the 1976 presidential election, defeating Republican incumbent Gerald Ford.

Much like his party colleague Barack Obama more than three decades later, Carter positioned himself as an outsider who would bring about change in Washington. At that time, the population had lost confidence in the political caste after the Watergate affair and the Vietnam War. "Carter seemed to be exactly the type of leader the disillusioned nation was looking for," writes historian Julian Zelizer in his Jimmy Carter biography.

Foreign policy crises

However, hopes were dashed. To be sure, Carter was able to record some foreign policy successes: the Camp David Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt, the establishment of diplomatic relations with China, the SALT II Treaty with the Soviet Union on the limitation of nuclear weapons.

But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 caught Carter off guard, and the hostage crisis in Tehran completed the image of a weak and incompetent head of state in the eyes of his critics.

Radical students had stormed the US embassy in Iran after the Islamic Revolution, and an attempt to liberate the more than 50 detained Americans ended in a fiasco. Rising unemployment and high inflation also contributed to the bad mood in the election year 1980 and finally led to Carter's defeat against the Republican challenger Ronald Reagan after only one term.

Honoured with Nobel Peace Prize

Carter began his second career as a peace ambassador in 1982 with the founding of the non-governmental organization Carter Center. Wherever conflicts flared up and people were in distress due to poverty, disease or violence, the ex-president showed up and travelled to more than 140 countries.

In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for his decades of tireless efforts to resolve international conflicts peacefully, promote democracy and human rights, and advance economic and social development."