François Hollande

François Hollande (born August 12, 1954, Rouen, France) is a French politician who was president of France (2012–17). He earlier served as first secretary of the Socialist Party (1997–2008).

Early life and political rise

The son of a physician in France’s northwestern Haute-Normandie région, Hollande was educated at the elite École Nationale d’Administration, where his classmates included future prime minister Dominique de Villepin and future Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, who would also become Hollande’s longtime companion. In 1979, while still a student, Hollande joined the Socialist Party, and he worked as an economic adviser in the administration of Pres. François Mitterrand. He graduated from the école in 1980. The following year Hollande unsuccessfully challenged Jacques Chirac for the parliamentary seat representing Corrèze département but was appointed special assistant on economic affairs in the Mitterrand administration. Hollande next served as chief of staff for two successive government spokespersons for Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy.

In 1988 Hollande was elected to represent Corrèze in the National Assembly. He lost the seat in 1993 but won it back in 1997. That same year he succeeded Lionel Jospin as leader of the Socialist Party, after Jospin was appointed prime minister in a cohabitation government in which the conservative Chirac served as president. In addition to his party chairmanship and his seat in the National Assembly, Hollande held a number of local and provincial posts during this time, most notably serving as mayor of Tulle (2001–08). As party leader, Hollande was sometimes overshadowed by fellow Socialists who were perhaps more outwardly telegenic, such as Royal or the economist Dominique Strauss-Kahn. In time Hollande came to embrace this status, and he willingly accepted the nickname “Monsieur Normal” that was bestowed upon him by the press. After Socialist candidates lost two successive presidential elections—Jospin was trounced in the 2002 election’s first round of voting, and Royal lost to Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007—Hollande resigned as party leader in 2008.

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France: The Hollande administration

One month after the 2007 election, Royal publicly disclosed that she and Hollande had separated. The news added a sharper flavour to Royal’s subsequent efforts to succeed Hollande as party leader, but she was defeated by Lille Mayor Martine Aubry. The arrest of Strauss-Kahn in May 2011 on charges of sexual assault, however, caused even more tension throughout the party’s ranks. Although the charges were eventually dropped, Strauss-Kahn, the presumptive Socialist nominee in the 2012 presidential election, resigned as director of the International Monetary Fund and was abruptly removed as a viable Socialist candidate. With his foremost rivals sidelined, Hollande steadily made a case for himself as the Socialist nominee, presenting a moderate platform that drew an unexpected endorsement from former president Chirac. In October 2011, in France’s first ever open primary elections, Hollande secured the Socialist Party nomination over Aubry. On April 22, 2012, Hollande topped the field in the first round of the presidential election, setting up a runoff against the incumbent Sarkozy on May 6. In that event, Hollande secured a close but convincing victory, capturing almost 52 percent of the vote, and he was inaugurated as president of France on May 15.

Presidency

Within hours of his inauguration, Hollande flew to Berlin, where he met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Since the beginning of the euro-zone debt crisis, Merkel and Sarkozy had promoted austerity as the cure for Europe’s ills, but Hollande favoured an approach that emphasized growth. Merkel, who had been vocal in her support of Sarkozy during the presidential campaign, nonetheless found common ground with Hollande, and the two spent much of the remaining year promoting the EU’s new fiscal compact. By year’s end Hollande had proposed an increase in the value-added tax, cuts in state spending, and a new corporate tax credit. In December 2012 his legislation to boost the top individual tax rate (to 75%) was ruled unconstitutional, although he reintroduced the measure the following year, shifting the burden of the tax from individuals to employers. His popularity slumped, however, as France’s economy remained stagnant despite signs that it had officially emerged from recession.

Hollande was a vocal critic of Syrian Pres. Bashar al-Assad and, after the alleged use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Civil War, called for foreign military intervention in that conflict. A joint effort by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov resulted in an agreement whereby Syria would surrender its chemical weapons arsenal, but Hollande remained a strong proponent of French military action abroad. In January 2013 he dispatched French troops to combat Islamist militants in Mali, and in December a French-sponsored UN Security Council resolution authorized armed intervention in the Central African Republic. Some 1,600 French troops supplemented an existing African Union force in the Central African Republic, but that application of what was increasingly known as the “Hollande doctrine” was met with indifference by the French electorate in spite of widespread support for previous military engagements in Africa.

Hollande’s approval numbers experienced a modest boost in January 2014 when a celebrity tabloid magazine alleged that he was having an affair with a French actress. The French public, famously protective of the privacy of its elected leaders, rallied around Hollande, with an overwhelming majority of voters stating that they considered the affair to be a personal matter.

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He received no such support in local elections in March 2014, however, when candidates from the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire; UMP) and Marine Le Pen’s National Front swept the Socialists from office in scores of mayoral races. Hollande responded by reshuffling his cabinet, replacing Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault with interior minister Manuel Valls. French voters continued to express their dissatisfaction with Hollande in May 2014, when the Socialists finished a distant third behind the National Front and the UMP in European Union parliamentary elections. Valls characterized the result as an “earthquake,” an expression of staunch Euroskepticism in a country that had traditionally been a stalwart supporter of European integration.

After a deadly attack on the satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, the country rallied around Hollande. His approval numbers soon plummeted again, however, and the Socialists were crushed in local elections that March. Although Hollande was praised for his role in brokering a bailout agreement between EU leaders and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, his domestic agenda met resistance from his own party. Attempts to jump-start the moribund economy were welcomed by the business sector, but Valls was twice forced to invoke a little-used procedure to bypass opposition and enact economic reforms without a parliamentary vote.

In November at least 129 people were killed and hundreds were wounded in coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attacks, and Hollande declared a state of emergency and stated that France was “at war” with the group. An international manhunt targeted those who were suspected of involvement with the plot, and French warplanes struck targets in the ISIL stronghold of Al-Raqqah. Hollande also proposed expanded security measures and greater cooperation with the U.S. and Russian forces already conducting military campaigns against ISIL. Hollande’s approval numbers were consistently low throughout his presidency, but in 2016 they dipped into the single digits amid continued economic stagnation and a rising wave of populism. On December 1, 2016, he announced that he would not seek a second term, becoming the first sitting president in modern French history to decline to run for reelection.

Later life

After leaving office Hollande released the memoir Les Leçons du pouvoir (2018; “The Lessons of Power”), in which he discussed his decision not to run for reelection and defended his presidency. In addition, he was highly critical of his successor, Emmanuel Macron.