The candidate hoping to emulate party hero François Mitterrand has a low-key, affable image
WITH JUST over 100 days to go before France chooses its next president, François Hollande pledged to “restore hope” in the country and convince voters that Nicolas Sarkozy should be denied a second term.
At the opening of his campaign headquarters in Paris yesterday, the Socialist Party’s nominee rallied supporters by promising to invest “all my energy, strength, character and time” into the four-month campaign.
To project an image of unity in a party often riven by factions, Hollande was surrounded by party heavyweights, including former prime ministers Lionel Jospin and Laurent Fabius and the five colleagues he defeated for the nomination last autumn. “Our unity is an essential condition for convincing [the French people],” he said.
Hollande is hoping to emulate party hero François Mitterrand, the only left-wing president since the current republic was founded in 1958. Stressing his debt to Mitterrand, Hollande visited the former president’s grave this week and has modelled parts of his campaign, including election themes, posters and slogans, on the victorious 1981 effort.
One of those in attendance yesterday, socialist mayor of Paris Bertrand Delanoë, said Hollande and Mitterrand were "more France profondethan Fouquet's", contrasting a term that evokes the French heartland with the expensive Paris restaurant where Sarkozy celebrated his 2007 election victory with celebrity friends. Fouquet's has become a synonym for Sarkozy's brash, urban, soap opera lifestyle, and the Hollande campaign hopes its candidate's image as a low-key, affable consensus-builder from rural Corrèze will appeal to voters after five years of the mercurial Sarkozy's rule.
The incumbent’s supporters believe Hollande is vulnerable, however, and were encouraged when the first opinion poll of 2012 showed the gap between the pair narrowing. According to the Ifop survey, Hollande would win 54 per cent of the second-round vote – down 2 per cent on the last poll – to Sarkozy’s 46 per cent, up 2 per cent cent.
Although Sarkozy has not yet officially declared, a flurry of recent initiatives suggest he is already in campaign mode. These include his push for a financial transaction tax, a plan to slash high labour costs and a surprise offer of financial support for a trade union-organised workers’ co-operative in its bid to save hundreds of jobs at SeaFrance, a bankrupt ferry operator.
Sarkozy’s supporters regularly point to Hollande’s inexperience – he never served in government – and minister of state Nadine Morano even warned yesterday that the socialist would be “dangerous” for France.
While the focus is on the duel between the two largest parties, the outcome could be shaped by the performances of two other candidates: Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, and François Bayrou of the centrist Mouvement Démocrate.
Le Pen’s efforts to “detoxify” the front since taking over the leadership from her father Jean-Marie last year, as well as her anti-euro stance and co-opting of left-wing rhetoric, have given the party a boost. The Ifop poll put her support at 17 per cent – the same level that secured her father a place in the second round in 2002.
Of equal significance, however, is the momentum behind the popular Bayrou, a former education minister who is running for president for the third time. He has been gaining on Le Pen in recent surveys, and a Viavoice poll this week put him in third place, behind Sarkozy and Hollande, as respondents’ preferred president.
If those trends hold, new permutations could open up. With a clutch of smaller candidates such as Eva Joly of the Greens, the left-wing Jean-Luc Mélenchon and former prime minister Dominique de Villepin all in the field, the question arises of whether either the right- or left-wing vote could split sufficiently in the first round on April 22nd to allow either Le Pen or Bayrou through to the play-off.
Even if that doesn’t happen, how will those who choose Le Pen, Bayrou or the other smaller parties in the first round decide to vote in the play-off? The trend is encouraging for Hollande, who would take 70-90 per cent of Joly’s and Mélenchon’s support, 59 per cent of Bayrou’s and 46 per cent from Le Pen.