Hollande popularity rises amid rumours of political comeback
HE WAS among France’s most unpopular presidents when he left office.
So low were his approval ratings at the end of his mandate in 2017 – 3 per cent wanted him to run for re-election – that François Hollande chose not to stand for a second term, paving the way for Emmanuel Macron’s election.
However, the 69-year-old Socialist has bounced back to such an extent that he is now France’s third-most-popular political figure after Gabriel Attal, the French prime minister, and Edouard Philippe, Mr Macron’s former prime minister, according to an Ifop poll last month.
And with his Socialist Party embroiled in an alliance with the hardleft under Jean-luc Mélenchon and the Greens, Mr Hollande now reportedly believes there could be a way for him to return to front-line politics “through a mouse hole”, according to aides cited by
“President Hollande has aroused a real and constant fervour in the various trips he has made since leaving the Élysée Palace. But for the past two or three years, there has been increasing talk of his return,” a close aide told the conservative newspaper.
While the same source said he was not “thinking about” another crack at the presidency in 2027, another Socialist Party figure told the paper: “If he can come back, he will come back.”
Looking back in December at his five-year mandate from 2012 to 2017, Mr Hollande said: “I’d thought of a campaign slogan if I’d stood for re-election. It was: ‘All things considered, it wasn’t so bad.’”
Gaspard Gantzer, his former Elysée spin doctor, said: “For the first time, I think that his re-election in 2027 is possible, I feel something is happening.”
Compared with the younger politicians, his experience could work in his favour, as it has with a string of older leaders around the world, he claimed.
In his editorial, Le Figaro’s Guillaume Tabard said that Mr Hollande is convinced that there is a place for a leader of a “governing Left” between the increasingly Right-leaning Mr Macron and virulently Leftist Mr Mélenchon, both of whom are a turn-off for the majority of centre-left voters.