François Hollande has returned. And watching him campaign in his lifelong fiefdom is a strange feeling. In Tulle, in the rural department of Corrèze, they love him, and he lets himself be loved, greeting everyone, signing autographs, remembering faces and names like the politicians of yesteryear. “Here he is at home,” says a pensioner who has just attended the former French president’s rally. “It’s very popular in Tulle.”
The socialist Hollande, today's candidate for the left-wing coalition of the New Popular Front for the parliamentary elections next Sunday, is in his element. You can see that he has missed the campaigns. He did a lot of it in the Corrèze, in the centre of France, far from everything, where he developed himself as a politician and was a deputy before becoming president, like one of his predecessors in the same district, Jacques Chirac.
After seven years out of power and more than a decade without election campaigns, Hollande says this is not the time to shirk responsibilities. He argues that if there was ever a time to jump back into the ring, it was now, when Marine Le Pen's National Regroupment (RN) stands at the gates of power.
“Am I falling prey to a kind of vertigo and am I returning to my youth to reject the inexorable aging that is befalling me, like the others?”, began the speech on Thursday evening in a Tulle auditorium. Laughter in the room. And more serious faces when he added: “No, if I am here, it is because the times are serious and because I have considered that we all have to do something more than just vote: get involved.”
Hollande will speak for 40 minutes to a room where the average age is over 50. Later, he will tell EL PAÍS: “I don’t believe that democracy is in danger in the sense that a party is taking power and suppressing elections, no. But democracy, in the sense of party representation, of having credible changes, 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.”
Knowing what's happening outside means understanding what will happen inside, don't miss anything.
These are anomalous elections for several reasons. By means of 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 because of the speed of the campaign, only three weeks. Above all, because the parliamentary elections, the second round of which will take place on July 7, could lead to an extreme right-wing government and prime minister.
Among the anomalies, there is another: that of a former president who aspires to become deputy. It is not the first. If elected, he would follow in the footsteps of one of his predecessors, Valery Giscard D'Estaingwho took his seat in the National Assembly after, like Hollande, a one-term president and leaving the Elysée with popularity at a low point.
What is exceptional in Hollande's case is that he is running for a coalition with some of his fiercest critics when he was head of state between 2012 and 2017. From Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La Francia Insumisa (LFI)Hollande said it was “the problem of the left,” and during the meeting he launched into one of his ironies. The former president complained that the Macronists and the right are demonizing LFI to scare voters, as they were decades ago about 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 was defending LFI, but he clarified: “Although in some points and sometimes it is so…” More laughter.
Another exceptional feature of this campaign: in Corrèze a new chapter unfolds in one of these stories of betrayal and revenge that abound in French politics. Today, Hollande faces the RN, but also his most advanced disciple. This is Macron, the man who was his precocious economic advisor and Minister of Economy; the one who, according to Hollande himself, “methodically” betrayed him to run for the 2017 presidential elections, win them and liquidate him politically.
Time for revenge for Hollande? “He is way above this!”, a socialist sympathizer defends him among the Tulle audience. “If it were about settlements,” Hollande defends himself at the end of the event, “I would have expressed it differently.”
Hollande’s candidacy alongside the left in these parliamentary elections was a blow to 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 also includes the radicals of Mélenchon is a way of saying to the social-democratic voter who hesitates between Macronism and the left that Macron describes as extremist: “You can vote without any problem for the New Popular Front. of conscience.”
Macron responded with a new revenge on Hollande's action. His candidacy, Ensemble, decided not to propose a candidate for his constituency of Corrèze and asked for a vote for the former president's rival on the right of the Republicans, the deputy François Dubois. And this despite the fact that Dubois voted in favor of a failed motion of censure against Macron's government a year ago. All forgiven Dubois; nothing for Hollande, who notes: “It is true that at the level of human rules there is much to discuss…”.
Neither vanity for the life of a second political youth, according to Hollande, nor a vengeful spirit: “What has decided me to come out of my restraint is the realization of the risk my country is running.” “Tomorrow,” the president expected during the meeting, “could be a particularly dark day.”
“The time is urgent,” he will repeat, and when asked by EL PAÍS he confirms: “If the far right comes to power in France, we must be aware that Europe will stop. “The decision that the French people will take goes beyond the borders of France.”
There is little press at the rally, almost all local, and outside press draws attention. “In this room I saw some Spanish journalists,” Hollande's opening act, his deputy Philippe Brugère, noted in his speech. “And I think of them, I think of the slogan of the Spanish Republicans in 1936. Sing it with me: They won't pass, they won't pass, they won't pass”. The audience joined in the chorus and Hollande took the stand: his last fight.
Follow all international information Facebook And Xor inside our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without borders
_