French president Francois Hollande will not seek reelection next year, he said Thursday, becoming the first incumbent in decades not to seek a second term.
Hollande has been beset by low public approval and strife within his country’s political left. Reuters reports:
Hollande beat conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in an election in May 2012 after a classic leftwing campaign in which he targeted big business and pledged to raise taxes for high earners. But his popularity soon began to decline with a perceived lack of leadership and flip-flops on key issues, particularly tax reform, which dismayed many on the left. His popularity has been undermined by stubbornly high unemployment and anemic economic growth. Grassroots supporters were further alienated by a pro-business switch in 2014, a wavering over security reforms, and by labor laws that brought thousands out onto the streets in protests early this year.
Christopher Caldwell wrote last month about the beginning of France’s presidential election cycle and the seemingly poor odds Hollande’s Socialists would face at the polls:
It has generally been assumed that the moribund party will be the Socialists. Battered by terrorism and unemployment for much of his tenure, Hollande has seen his popularity ratings fall into a sub-Nixonian abyss. An early November poll by the national daily Le Figaro found that only 11 percent of French people have “confidence” in him. Occasionally his numbers nose up to the twenties. That has happened after each of the Islamist terrorist attacks of the past two years, when the French have felt they must stand behind their head of state. But then Hollande will say something silly, and his numbers fall. In October, two journalists at the daily Le Monde, Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme, came out with a book based on interviews with Hollande, who had given them extraordinary access over his first four years. It was called “A President Shouldn’t Say That” (“Un président ne devrait pas dire ça. . .”). Hollande’s entourage doubtless hoped it would cast him in a new light, as a truth-teller, a taker-on of taboos. But, as the book climbed to the top of the bestseller lists, it was clear that a president really shouldn’t say such things.
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