France’s François Hollande gives up on running for a second term

SINCE France’s fifth republic began in 1958, no president in good health has ever failed to stand for re-election. Yet last night that is what François Hollande decided to do. “I have served the country with sincerity,” the Socialist president declared, in an unexpected television broadcast. But with unemployment high and the left at risk of fragmentation, he said, he would not run again in next spring’s presidential election. Mr Hollande’s decision underlines the chronic weakness of the French left and opens up its leadership to a new generation.

Mr Hollande’s retirement was not as obvious a decision as it might appear. Although his approval ratings had dropped to levels beyond parody—4% in one poll—he has always had uncommon confidence in his capacity to vanquish conventional wisdom. Until recently, even those around him thought he might run again. After a testy lunch this week with Manuel Valls, his centre-left prime minister (who had begun to defy his boss), Mr Hollande appeared to put his junior in his place.

In the end, though, common sense prevailed. Confidence and trust in Mr Hollande have collapsed. The left is dismayed by his failure to bring down unemployment, as he promised to do many times. Socialists were mortified by his misguided attempt earlier this year to strip French-born dual citizens convicted of terrorism of their nationality. And the French were dumbfounded by his decision to confide state secrets to two journalists, who published them in a recent book. Polls suggested that Mr Hollande would not only fail to make it into the second-round run-off, but might come in fifth place in first-round voting. Even he realised that the humiliation of running again and doing badly would exceed that of giving up.

Mr Hollande’s decision closes a chapter on a generation of Socialist leaders. He got his first job in politics when the Socialist leader, François Mitterrand, was elected president in 1981. Many of those in his current government, including his environment minister and ex-partner, Ségolène Royal (with whom he has four adult children), started out with him, too. But Mr Hollande will leave behind him a French left that is electorally fragile and has failed to decide between two future paths: a reformist centre-left programme and a far-left socialist one.

This ideological battle will now begin, as the candidates prepare for the Socialist presidential primary in January. On one side stands Arnaud Montebourg, a combative former industry minister who once wrote a book arguing for “deglobalisation”, and who has already declared his candidacy. He is courting voters disillusioned with Mr Hollande’s failure to stop factory closures, protect jobs and keep campaign promises such as the 75% top income-tax rate he introduced but scrapped after a couple of years in office.

On the other side, it is almost certain that Mr Valls will now run as the standard-bearer of the moderate centre-left. A former interior minister who talks tough on law-and-order, Mr Valls once called for the word “socialist” to be dropped from the party’s name. He cut his political teeth working for Michel Rocard, France’s centre-left prime minister in 1988-91, whose social-democratic politics formed a markedly different school of thought on the left to the socialism of Mitterrand. But the once-popular Mr Valls has been dragged down during his time as prime minister by close association with Mr Hollande.

Mr Hollande, a natural consensus-seeker, always tried to reconcile the two strands in his party. With the president out of the way, the rivalry will come into the open. But the struggle will not only be inside the Socialist Party. It will also pit Mr Valls against another ambitious figure seeking to inherit the moderate centre-left: Emmanuel Macron. The 38-year-old former economy minister has already declared that he will run for the French presidency, but as an independent. To this end, he has founded a political movement, “En Marche!”, whose offices in Paris, strewn with take-away food boxes and filled with young people huddled over laptops, have the feel of a start-up.

The stage is now set for a fierce struggle for the centre-left between him and Mr Valls, 16 years his elder. Mr Macron, who once worked for Mr Hollande as an adviser (he called the president’s idea of a 75% tax rate “Cuba without the sun”), argues that his politics are not really about left and right. They are rather, he says, a “progressive” appeal to those of any party attracted to open, pro-European, market-friendly politics, and who oppose “conservative” values on either side. Yet Mr Macron and Mr Valls will clearly be chasing many of the same voters.

Mr Hollande’s decision is a reminder of the fluidity of French politics. Until now, it had looked as if the far-right Marine Le Pen would easily come top in the first round of next year’s election. It still looks likely that she will win one of the two run-off places. But the centre-right Republicans have been buoyed by the election of François Fillon as their candidate. Polls now make him the first-round favourite, and suggest he could comfortably defeat Ms Le Pen in a run-off. France represents a crucial test of the ability of mainstream politics to resist populism. Mr Fillon offers one alternative. It is now the left’s turn to fashion another.