Hollande starts campaign

[viper37]

Nice discourse, I liked it.

Every moment I also thought would kill someone here.

Chavez has done such a great job with Venezuela, why not elect his clones in France, and Quebec too, while we're at it?

[Zoupa]

Yes viper. Francois Hollande is exactly like Chavez. His policies = same. Good argument.

[Grey Fox]

Nice discourse, I liked it.

Every moment I also thought would kill someone here.

Chavez has done such a great job with Venezuela, why not elect his clones in France, and Quebec too, while we're at it?

You are a rightwingtard, I'm a leftwingtard. Do we really need to have a conversation on this?

[Ed Anger]

I'm still pulling for Le Pen's kid, just for the comedy value.

[Oexmelin]

But then, as a foreigner, you wouldn't be welcome anymore in Normandy.

(Le Pen senior was anglophobe - don't know about his daughter)

[Ed Anger]

But then, as a foreigner, you wouldn't be welcome anymore in Normandy.

(Le Pen senior was anglophobe - don't know about his daughter)

I'll land on Omaha beach in a rubber boat.

[Malthus]

Speaking in Le Bourget, Mr Hollande promised to cut his own pay by and that of government by 30 per cent if elected Photo: AP

I know nothing about the guy, but that is one incredibly unflattering pic. 

[Sheilbh]

I know nothing about the guy, but that is one incredibly unflattering pic. 

I think the one of him embracing his inner-diva is even worse:

[The Minsky Moment]

The speech was pretty wretched, but after enduring the 843rd GOP primary debate, no American is an a position to cast a stone.

[Zanza]

What is the mentioned Franco-German pact about?

[Valmy]

What is the mentioned Franco-German pact about?

Hopefully a conspiracy to remake the Empire of the Franks.

[Sheilbh]

What is the mentioned Franco-German pact about?

I looked it up.  For some reason he wants to replace the Adenauer-de Gaulle treaty and, I think, make it more intense.

[Sheilbh]

He continues!

Will François Hollande be the president to rescue France's economy?
The socialist candidate with a narrow lead in the race for the French presidency says he has more to offer than just austerity

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 February 2012 15.19 GMT
Article history


François Hollande addresses a campaign rally in Le Mans. He says his main adversary is big finance 'gone mad' which must be regulated. Photograph: David Vincent/AP

In a bruising French presidential race increasingly peppered with personal digs and invective, the socialist frontrunner François Hollande has sometimes taken comfort in his rural constituency of Corrèze in the Limousin. Hollande recently had the most famous crash diet and makeover in French politics. But on the stump in Tulle where he is mayor, the self-styled Mr Normal shakes hands and loiters over indulgent cheese and sausage at the market.

"Here people make a fuss of me, give me ham, sweets ... Can you imagine all these magic potions?" he told reporters, likening local produce to a presidential elixir.

If Hollande maintains his narrowing lead in the polls, he would in May become France's first leftwing president since François Mitterrand. When he arrives in London for a campaign visit on Wednesday it is to amplify his claim that the left could do a better job of handling the economic crisis.

With rightwing governments running 23 out of 27 countries in the EU, and austerity measures their only tool, Hollande says he can offer something different. His message – more sober than the high-spending Mitterrand promises of 30 years ago – is that state spending should be brought under control and deficits curbed, but that governments must also find ways to back growth and education or austerity measures won't work. He says his main adversary is big finance "gone mad", which must be regulated.

For years, Corrèze, a sparsely populated corner of central France, has been Hollande's laboratory of debt. Once the fiefdom of Jacques Chirac, it is where Hollande took on the right. It became a provincial anchor for the career politician and policy-wonk who led the Socialist party for 11 years but never served in government, and whose former partner Ségolène Royal, mother of his four children, ran as socialist presidential candidate in 2007. Corrèze is the most indebted department in France.

Hollande said he inherited the debt from the right and had to tighten belts to steer it back on track. To some, it is a microcosm of a nation on its knees.

France, the eurozone's second largest economy, with generous welfare and one of the highest levels of public spending in western Europe, has been told by its national auditor it risks an unsustainable debt spiral. Unemployment is at a 12-year high of almost 10%, recession is looming, the triple A credit rating has been downgraded and the country owes so much that interest repayments are the second biggest item of state expenditure after education.

The hole in state coffers has provided an element of consensus in Paris. Both Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy have made it a priority to restore public finances and whoever wins the election will have to find €100bn (£85bn) of belt-tightening measures in the next five years to plug the deficit. Against this backdrop, Hollande – a consensus-builder who once taught economics and comes from the pro-European middle ground of the socialist camp – has presented a programme that is deliberately detached from old left traditions.

His 60-point manifesto takes care to avoid mentioning raising the minimum wage, increasing salaries or splurging on public sector jobs. His first move to tackle debt would be to scrap €29bn worth of tax breaks for wealthier people introduced under Sarkozy.

He would then make the richest pay their share of the burden of dragging France out of the crisis, by raising the tax bracket for the highest earners and increase taxes on banks and big companies, ploughing €20bn back into helping growth through support to small businesses, industry, research and 150,000 state-assisted jobs for young people.

For Hollande's delicate balancing act to work, he needs economic growth to creep back up by mid-way through a presidential term. "Let's hope for him the growth forecasts on which he based his project are up to it. From 2012, nothing is less certain," warned Le Monde.

"There's a certain economic realism," said Frédéric Sawacki at Paris University comparing the manifesto with Mitterrand's. "There will be more effort by the rich, but the programme doesn't promise a radical change of society."

Henri Rey of the Institute of Political Science in Paris said: "Because of the crisis, there's an emphasis on budget rigour, paying back debt. There's no escape, they have to do it." Hollande will create 60,000 jobs in education but has vowed they will come from squeezing other departments of state. Despite France's huge state sector – 5.3 million workers, 20% of the workforce – he said he will stop Sarkozy's non-replacement of one in two public sector workers who retire. The right says this is reckless.

This week Hollande announced that those earning more than €1m a year would have to pay 75% tax, which would be a record in Europe. He called it "patriotism" for the rich to make an effort to help France.

Hollande has recently hammered home the central rhetoric of his big campaign rallies that finance "gone mad" must be regulated. In his book, Changing Destiny, a kind of personal mission statement published last week, he stressed the need to limit the "exorbitant power of finance in our country".

Sawicki said Hollande's battle-ground on finance was "symbolic" and in line with public opinion across Europe but that the detail in his manifesto was straightforward and not very different from the drive for regulation elsewhere. Hollande would force banks to separate their investment banking and retail businesses, as in the UK and US. He will introduce a financial transaction tax, already announced by his rightwing opponent Sarkozy. He will ban banks from operating in tax havens, regulate bonuses and scrap stock options, except for start-ups. He will increase tax on banks' profits and wants a European credit ratings agency.

If Sarkozy has come to be lampooned by opponents as the president who promised reforms and did not deliver, Hollande is keen to avoid the word "promise" altogether.

Pierre Moscovici, his campaign manager, said people didn't want "miraculous promises" but a France put in order. He said that, unlike the past, there would be no big promises and then disappointment when there was "no more money left". He predicted instead two years of big effort to get the country back on its feet. Hollande said that when he was out campaigning "people don't ask for rash promises" but for respect.

Hollande peppers his speeches with the word République, defending French values of liberty, equality and fraternity which he says have been wrecked by the right – namely a school system among the most unequal in Europe and high youth unemployment in a country where one in five young people live below the poverty line. Unlike Sarkozy, Hollande is in favour of gay marriage and adoption, and has backed euthanasia. He wants to cut France's dependence on nuclear energy from 75% to 50% by 2025. He will maintain Sarkozy's reformed pension age at 62, but said those who started work young and have paid their dues can stop work at 60.

Hollande acknowledges his task will be hard if he is elected. "Never has a leftwing government come to power in such a delicate situation, both internally and in Europe," he has said.

I think Sarko's pitch for the right's votes (anti-gay marriage and adoption, family values (!) rhetoric) has worked because I understand they're only 2-5% apart on polls for the first round.  The second round polls have Hollande with a 17 point lead though.