Francois Hollande affair: Why the two-timed ‘First Girlfriend’ faces harsh choice
PARIS — What a difference a week makes. On Monday, Valerie Trierweiler, France’s informal first lady was hosting an exclusive private screening of Yves Saint Laurent, the acclaimed biopic on the late couturier.
At the cocktail party that followed, where fashionistas, Vogue editors and cabinet ministers mingled under the gilt ceilings of the Elysee with a few handpicked political journalists, the president’s elegant partner distilled confidences amid the air kisses, ranging from how hard “Francois” was working “for France” to her plans to extend her own charitable missions to India, The Telegraph reported yesterday.
At that moment, Trierweiler could have been forgiven for thinking that, after a very rocky start, she had established her problematic role as the country’s First Girlfriend — the unmarried partner of a 59- yearold president who had never quite wanted to tie the knot with anyone.
That was then. On Saturday, after the previous day’s claims, backed by apparent photo evidence in the gossip magazine Closer, that President Francois Hollande had been two-timing her with an actress almost a decade her junior, Trierweiler is pondering her options.
The decision may not be solely hers to make: Hollande’s political advisers have advised the president, who is scheduled to give a major press conference next Tuesday, that he must make “a clean sweep” within the next 48 hours. Otherwise, they warn, his formal political announcements risk being overshadowed by speculation about his private affairs.
The president apparently knows of more alleged pictures being offered to Paris magazines. He has not denied he was seeing Julie Gayet, 41, the daughter of a personal friend, the renowned Paris surgeon Brice Gayet.
“A clean sweep” therefore can only mean enacting Trierweiler ’ s departure. But clean sweeps are what Hollande has spent a lifetime avoiding, in his private as well as in his political life.
The highly regarded political journalist Cecile Amar, in her forthcoming presidential biography, tells of Elysee aides being harshly reprimanded but never let go; of political enemies alternately frozen out, then brought back into the cabinet becauser Hollande believes he can control them better there.
Everyone in France knows that Hollande maintained for several years the polite fiction that he still lived with Segolene Royal, the mother of his four children and his partner for 23 years, even though he had moved to Trierweiler’s 15th arrondissement flat.
All that while, political journalists happily traded among themselves the names of many beauties who were apparently being squired by the then Socialist Party’s first secretary.
As a friend of the conservative former president Jacques Chirac and as a former youthful aide in Francois Mitterrand’s Elysee, Hollande presumably felt he could bank on the traditional French attitude to politicians’ privacy. His official reaction to the Closer allegations has been to “greatly deplore [the] invasion of his private life, to which he has a right as any other citizen does,” no doubt recalling his mentors’ long-unreported escapades.
Yet all indications are of a sea change in French attitudes. Of 45,000 respondents to “Does his affair with Julie Gayet make the President look more sympathetic or discredited?” on the Closer website, 78 percent answered “discredited.” Out of nearly 3,000 answers to the question “Should politicians’ private lives be off-limits?” on the site of Challenges, France’s closest answer to The Economist, 77 per cent said “no.”