Hollande’s soft spots don’t include marriage
The French president’s reign is deeply unpopular but he is relishing his adoring courtiers.
France shuts down and retreats to the beach during the summer but this has not stopped gossip about the country’s president and his girlfriend. He was widely supposed to be marrying her on his 60th birthday today, but she has been seen frolicking in the sea with another man.
Photographs of the actress Julie Gayet with Pierre Puybasset, a lawyer, on a Corsican beach have left France wondering if her romance with Francois Hollande is ‘‘fini’’, paving the way for a new ‘‘favourite’’ to help him blow out his candles.
Palace insiders say the truth is that Hollande is relishing life as the bachelor of the Elysee, flattered and fawned on, like a latter-day King Louis by his adoring courtiers, many of them attractive young women.
Hollande has stumbled from crisis to crisis since he dumped Valerie Trierweiler, his former girlfriend, after falling for Gayet. He had to endure ridicule after photographs appeared of him on a motor scooter travelling to a latenight tryst with the actress.
Hollande’s attempts since then to restore gravitas to his beleaguered presidency – the most unpopular in the history of the Fifth Republic – have met with little success: in the latest setbacks, a top court last week rejected part of his much-vaunted economic reform package, while a coalition partner threatened to walk out of the government.
Yet ‘‘President Normal’’, as Hollande calls himself, keeps on smiling. Since bringing Segolene Royal, the mother of his four children, into his cabinet as environment minister earlier this year, he has also turned to other women for advice.
Nathalie Iannetta, one of France’s television football presenters, was forced to deny that she had been given a job as Hollande’s sports adviser because she was having an affair with him. A daughter of Italian immigrants, she has known Hollande since 2002 when they discovered a shared passion for football.
The president is also rumoured to have a ‘‘weakness’’ for Axelle Lemaire, the new secretary of state for the digital economy, who previously led the London branch of the French Socialist party.
Audrey Azoulay, his new culture and media adviser and the daughter of an aide to the King of Morocco, is described as another ‘‘favourite’’ at court.
Gayet may have felt neglected. She has long been a staple of art house films and there is scarcely an inch of her body with which film buffs are not visually acquainted.
For all her reputation as a bohemian Left-winger, however, she is, like her respectable parents, conservative at heart. Rather than being treated as an occasional mistress she is said to have wanted Hollande to bring their relationship into the open.
The last straw for Gayet, it seems, was Hollande’s recent denial of plans to wed her on his birthday – his friends say he has always considered marriage ‘‘too bourgeois’’. This prompted Gayet to travel to Corsica for five days with Puybasset, where Voici magazine photographed them on the beach.
‘‘Between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and plane crashes, the president has not been as available as expected this summer,’’ said the magazine, suggesting Gayet felt abandoned.
According to some commentators, though, the pictures of Gayet in a bikini with the lawyer proved nothing: she might simply be punishing the president for his neglect of her and could still appear this week at the presidential retreat near Versailles, where Hollande is on holiday until Friday.
Alternatively, the president might join her, if briefly, at her family’s chateau in southern France.
His relationship with his children’s mother, with whom he lived for 29 years before moving in with Trierweiler, has improved recently as the departure of Trierweiler has helped to clear the air. It has also led some to wonder if Royal might even turn up for the birthday party.