Foreign Correspondent Jonathan Rugman blogs on François Hollande – the man hoping to topple President Sarkozy in the French elections.
He has billed himself as France’s “Mr Normal”, and watching François Hollande work a crowd of 15,000 in an exhibition hall in the northern town of Lille, he does indeed seem somewhat short of charisma, though long on promises.
“It’s time for change now” is his campaign’s Obama-like theme tune. In reality Hollande’s a Socialist apparatchik who ran his party for a decade. Though if his lead in the opinion polls is to be believed, he’s also the jovial father figure a frightened France is hoping will help them weather Europe’s economic storm.
Sweating heavily and speaking himself almost hoarse, Hollande rails against banks and financial speculators, though he earns the biggest cheer of the night with an attack on wealthy donors to President Sarkozy’s campaign, who have allegedly been staying at the Crillon, Paris’s most expensive hotel, and “inside the bedroom of Marie Antoinette”.
“If we don’t win this time, it will be the end of the Socialist Party,” Hollande’s son, Thomas, tells me afterwards, confirming that his father – once nicknamed “Flanby” after a French caramel pudding – has given up chocolate cake to get into shape for the race.
And what a travesty it will indeed be for the party if his father loses, given France’s economic downturn presided over by a deeply divisive Nicolas Sarkozy, and given that the last Socialist elected to the Elysee Palace was François Mitterrand back in the 1980s.
Is Hollande like Tony Blair then, I wonder, the leader who modernised Britain’s Labour Party to make it electable?
“No, he’s a traditional Socialist,” says Thomas without batting an eyelid.
“We will not change,” confirms Laurent Fabius, a former Socialist prime minister, scoffing at the Blair comparison when I join him on the train home to Paris. A reminder then that this side of the Channel, the political battle lines remain highly ideological.
Given that unemployment is at a 12-year high, with 400,000 jobs lost during the Sarkozy years, France’s Socialists may feel they don’t need to alter much to make themselves electable.
They promise to lower the age qualifying for a state pension back down to 60 when many economists and actuaries argue that, given the ballooning national debt, later retirement is essential.
Then there’s Hollande’s tax hike to 75 per cent on those earning more than 1m euros a year.
“It is stupid,” a Lille businessman called Patrice Pennel tells me, querying how many of Hollande’s changes will ever be implemented. “The French people are dreamers. There is no money in the state, no money in the bank so there will be cuts.”
The Socialists did introduce France’s notorious 35-hour working week. But I wonder that if Hollande is elected less than three weeks from now by people hoping he can keep their way of life safe, he will lose his ability to tell his supporters what they want to hear, and be forced by France’s financial situation into Cameron-lite declarations of fiscal austerity instead.
You can follow Jonathan Rugman on Twitter @jrug