François Hollande has returned. And watching him campaign in his lifelong fiefdom leaves a strange feeling. In Tulle, in the rural department of Corrèze, they love him, and he lets himself be loved, and greets everyone, signs autographs and remembers faces and names like the politicians of yesteryear. “Here he is at home,” says a retiree who has just attended the former French president’s rally. “He is very popular in Tulle.”
Socialist Hollande, who is running for the left-wing New Popular Front coalition in Sunday’s general elections, is in his element. He clearly missed campaigning. He did a lot of it in Corrèze, in central France, far from everything, where he cut his teeth as a politician and was a member of parliament before becoming president, just like one of his predecessors in the same district, Jacques Chirac.
After seven years out of power and more than a decade away from election campaigns, Hollande says that now is not the time to shirk responsibilities. He argues that if there was ever a time to jump back into the fray, it was now, when Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) party is on the brink of power.
“Am I the prey of a kind of vertigo and return to the years of youth to reject the inexorable aging that, like the others, overtakes me?” began the speech on Thursday night in an assembly hall in Tulle. Laughter in the room. And more serious faces when he added: “No, if I am here it is because the time is serious and because I have considered that we must all do something more than simply vote: commit ourselves.”
Hollande will speak for 40 minutes in a room where the average age exceeds 50 years. Later, he will declare to EL PAÍS: “I do not believe that democracy is in danger in the sense that a party takes power and suppresses elections, no. But democracy, in the sense of party representation, of having alternations that can be credible, is fragile, and not only in France. Everywhere there is a collapse of political life, a weakening of parties and this is a danger for all democracies.”
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These are anomalous elections, for several reasons. Due to the surprise call announced by President Emmanuel Macron on the night of June 9 after suffering the worst electoral defeat of his career in the European elections. And due to the speed of the campaign, only three weeks. Above all, because the legislative elections, whose second round will be held on July 7, can lead to a far-right government and prime minister.
Among the anomalies, there is another: that of a former president who aspires to be a deputy. He is not the first. If elected, he would follow in the footsteps of another of his predecessors, Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, who occupied a seat in the National Assembly after having been, like Hollande, a one-term president, and having left the Elysée Palace with his popularity at rock bottom.
What is exceptional in Hollande’s case is that he is running for a coalition that includes some of his fiercest critics when he was head of state between 2012 and 2017. Regarding Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise (LFI), Hollande said that he was “the problem of the left”, and at the rally he made one of his ironic comments. The former president complained that the Macronists and the right demonise LFI to scare voters, just as decades ago they were frightened by the communists and the danger of the USSR. “It is as if LFI has now become the Supreme Soviet,” he said, and it seemed as if he were defending LFI, but he qualified it: “Although in some points it is already sometimes…” More laughter.
Another exceptional feature of this campaign: in Corrèze, a new chapter is unfolding in one of those stories of betrayal and revenge that are so common in French politics. Hollande is facing the RN these days, but also its most advanced disciple. This is Macron, the man who was his precocious economic advisor and Minister of the Economy; the one who, according to Hollande himself, “methodically” betrayed him in order to run for the 2017 presidential election, win it and politically eliminate him.
Time for revenge for Hollande? “He is far above all this!” defends a socialist supporter in the audience in Tulle. “If it were a matter of settling scores,” Hollande himself defends himself at the end of the event, “I would have put it differently.”
Hollande’s candidacy alongside the left in these legislative elections was a blow for Macron. Because Hollande is a moderate socialist, with a vision similar to Macron’s about the EU and the world, and an economic policy that was not so different. The support of someone like him for a left-wing coalition that includes Mélenchon’s radicals is a way of saying to the social democratic voter who hesitates between Macronism and a left that Macron describes as extremist: “You can vote for the New Popular Front without problems of conscience.”
Macron responded to Hollande’s move with another revenge. His party, Ensemble, decided not to put forward a candidate in its Corrèze constituency and asked for a vote for the former president’s rival on the right of the Republicans, the MP François Dubois. And this, despite the fact that Dubois voted a year ago in favour of a failed motion of censure against Macron’s government. All is forgiven for Dubois; nothing for Hollande, who comments: “It is true that on the level of human rules it would give much to talk about…”
Neither vanity for living a second political youth, according to Hollande, nor vengeful spirit: “What has decided me to come out of my reserve is the awareness of the risk that my country runs.” “Tomorrow,” the president anticipates at the rally, “may be a particularly dark day.”
“The time is serious,” he will repeat, and, when asked by EL PAÍS, he affirms: “If the extreme right comes to power in France, we must be aware that Europe is going to stop. “The decision that the French people will make goes beyond the borders of France.”
There are few press at the rally, almost all local, and those from outside draw attention. “In this room, I saw some Spanish journalists,” Hollande’s support actor, his substitute candidate Philippe Brugère, observed in his speech. “And I think of them, I think of the slogan of the Spanish republicans in 1936. Sing it with me: They will not pass, they will not pass, they will not pass”. The room joined in the chorus and Hollande took the stand: his last fight.
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