The return of a controversial figure: François Hollande is already campaigning to be president of France

The former French socialist president left the government discredited, with ties with his party in dispute and involved in a love soap operawhich included his ex-partner, Ségolène Royal – mother of his four children -, the journalist Valérie Trierweiler and an actress and film producer, Julie Gayet, whom he eventually married and is happy. He will not participate in the socialist internal party, but he is already a national deputy.

The country’s public life had long been dominated by the ambitions and resentments of these two competing figures: Royal, the defeated Socialist candidate in the 2007 presidential election, and Hollande, who represented the party five years later after its victory.

But now it became known that Hollande, with very high popularity, returns, and Ségolène Royal will appear in the socialist internship. The difference is that Hollande has become very popular and is convinced that He is the only one who can stop Jean-Luc Mélenchonfather of Rebellious France, in a runoff, when it is not known whether or not the far-right Marine Le Pen will be a candidate due to her judicial conviction at the Court of Cassation.

Hollande and Ségolène shared a 30-year relationship, several positions in the government of Mitterrand and Lionel Jospin, and four children. Royal stated in a recent interview that his presidential aspirations had been thwarted, in part, by Hollande’s infidelity: your “bigamy”, as she called her two-decade-old romance with the periodista Valérie Trierweiler.

This month it became known that his withdrawal from public life was not definitive. Royal announced that he would run in next year’s election. Hollande indicated that he was also preparing to run, but will not participate in the Socialist internal race.

The revenge between the most famous political couple in the country did not exactly excite the socialist bureaucrats. “We are fed up,” declared one of them to the regional newspaper “Sud Ouest”, which described the return of Royal and Hollande as “strange”. Nothing is strange in this French political scene.

Hollande refuses to follow Royal’s example by participating in the socialist primaries. Instead, he hopes that the internal party elections will fail and that the center-left turns to him as “the savior” in the European autumn.

Frédéric Dabi, opinion chief of Ifop, said: “He is letting other candidates expose themselves and take the hits.”

Among these candidates is his ex-partner. Royal, 72, who He has not held public office since 2020declared on social media that she was running to prevent Le Pen from making history in a country that has never had a female head of state.

“How could I sit idly by the hypothesis that the first woman to become president could be from the extreme right?” she declared.

She has stated having forgiven Hollande for his infidelity in 2007when she was the socialist candidate and he was the first secretary of the party. However, he hasn’t forgotten the episode, as he made clear in an interview last month with Legend, a YouTube channel.

“I was a victim of bigamy“Royal said. “What the French people didn’t see (during the 2007 election campaign), what I kept silent about, was that I had to face that, on top of raising my four children.”

“He was supposed to support me as my partner, as the father of my children, as the first secretary of the Socialist Party. Every day he told me: ‘This is going to get better. It’s going to stop. You will understand the cruelty and absurdity of the situation.’ ‘He’s going to say: I’ve been a fool. Now I’m going to behave’. But not. He didn’t do it,” denounced Royal, who shares several grandchildren with Hollande.

He claimed that Socialist leaders should, at the very least, have asked Hollande to resign as party leader. “If the situation had been the other way around, a presidential candidate with a woman accompanying him on the other hand, abandoning the children and without even supporting him, would have been told: ‘Let him go!'”

But the anger has subsided. Ségolène was the most important minister in his cabinet during Hollande’s government. Until now He had not talked about his “bigamy.”

Marine Le Pen defiantly runs for French presidency.

Bruno Cautrès, a researcher at the Cevipof Institute of Political Studies, described his attempt to return to politics as “bold”, two decades after his failed presidential campaign. He doubted he could win the socialist primaries, much less the presidential election. Other commentators suggested that he was running solely to maintain his public image and possibly to sabotage Hollande’s candidacy.

Hollande left office in 2017, following a presidency marked by policy reversals, cabinet divisions and a 4% approval rating.

In turn, Trierweiler, who found himself in the role of jilted lover and deceived first lady when it was learned that he was having an extramarital relationship with Julie Gayet—an actress whom he later married and whom he visited on a motorcycle to go unnoticed—wrote a book in which she denounced that he called poor people “toothless.”

Analysts assumed that a quiet retirement awaited Hollande, nicknamed “Flanby” in reference to a caramel custard dessert, because He was fat.

However, a survey by the Ifop-Fiducial institute for the magazine “Paris Match” revealed that the 71-year-old socialist is now “the most popular politician in the country”, with 45% of respondents having a good opinion of him and 4% having an excellent one.

The only public figure who surpassed Hollande in the poll was Michel-Édouard Leclerc, owner of a supermarket group with alleged political interests.

These results have reinforced Hollande’s belief that he might still have the chance to return to the Elysée.

He immediately summoned 160 influential supporters to a cocktail party in the Paris Senate and announced that he was preparing to run in next year’s presidential election.

Prima facie, His victory seems unlikely. Given Macron’s inability to run for a third term, Marine Le Pen, candidate of the right-wing populist National Rally partywidely leads the voting intentionaccording to surveys. Édouard Philippe, a former center-right prime minister, is in second place, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a veteran of the radical left, is third.

The center-left finds itself in chaos: rejected by large sectors of the electorate and undecided, even on how to choose a candidate. Many socialists blame Hollande’s disastrous mandate for their party’s discredit. Despite his renewed personal popularity, its electoral appeal remains limitedaccording to a survey by the Elabe Institute, which gives him around 9% of voting intention.

However, amid political uncertainty unprecedented in decades, Hollande’s supporters say they are convinced that public opinion will change in the coming months. They present him as “an experienced figure, capable of leading the country in these turbulent times.”

Vincent Thibault, director of studies at Elabe, expressed his hope in the former president: “François Hollande is gradually rising from his ashes,” he told the financial daily “Les Échos.”

“In a complex world, he presents himself as someone with experience who has already had to face crises such as the terrorist attacks of 2015 (in which 137 people died in France). In addition, he has the advantage of being credible at the international level,” he said.

Hollande He has the experience of many campaigns: It is in the summer where they begin, when everyone rests. The presidential stature barometer shows improvement in four areas: In July, François Hollande became the highest-ranked left-wing politician in terms of competence to be a good president, representation of France and the French people, and ability to make the decisions the country needs. Only in terms of a clear vision for the future did he fall behind Raphaël Glucksmann and Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

François Hollande wants to believe that he is the only one on the left capable of defeating Mélenchon. But does not want a symbolic candidacy. The former president will only run for office if he is sure of winning.

However, if there is an election in which no one is certain about anything weeks, or even months, before, They are the presidential ones. Therefore, the Socialist Party primaries this fall risk clarifying nothing on the left as long as François Hollande keeps his candidacy ambiguous.