FRANCOIS HOLLANDE. Emmanuel Macron’s investiture ceremony will take place on Saturday May 7, 2022. Among the expected guests, François Hollande. Their relationship not being in good shape, his arrival is uncertain.
François Hollande should be back at the Elysée. Five years after leaving the presidential palace, the former President of the Republic will once again come forward on the steps and enter the heart of power. Emmanuel Macron indeed invited him, on Saturday May 7, 2022, to attend the investiture ceremony which should officially enthrone him as the new head of state. On May 5, the Elysée declared that the former heads of state, François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, had been invited to this ceremony. The presence of the predecessors is, according to the Elysée, a moment “part of a long path of political and historical traditions” of which “the president is the depositary”. However, their arrival has not yet been confirmed. If the entourage of François Hollande affirmed that he would go to the ceremony of May 7, some doubt it, given the somewhat distant relations between the two statesmen.
This tense relationship is above all linked to the liabilities between the two men. That of a strong proximity first, which began when Emmanuel Macron entered the government team of François Hollande in 2012. He was then deputy secretary general of the presidential cabinet of François Hollande, before becoming Minister of the Economy, of Industry and Digital from the summer of 2014, thus maintaining very good relations with the former socialist president, but also with his close entourage, some even becoming his advisers and helping him to climb the ladder, like Jean-Pierre Toy or Gaspard Gantzer. But, two years later, on August 30, 2016, it was the big change: Emmanuel Macron resigned from Bercy in order to grow his just launched movement, En Marche!.
Emmanuel Macron then declared himself a candidate for the presidential election, François Hollande renounced, and the ambitious young minister was then elected in 2017 under the banner of his centrist party. A victory leading to the slow death of the Socialist Party: defections, lack of means and, above all, a mobilization of voters which was brutally reduced, with a vote falling from 26.38% of the votes in the first round to 51.64% in the second round of 2012 for François Hollande, to only 6.36% in 2017 for Benoît Hamon, until falling below the 2% mark with the candidacy of the mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo in 2022. This decline helping, the interventions criticism, disapproval, even scathing of François Hollande vis-à-vis Emmanuel Macron have become more and more recurrent, through speeches in the media or in his books.
“Emmanuel Macron has not succeeded in building a political force behind him”, declared François Hollande at the microphone of the American television channel CNN on April 28, 2022. Very critical of the previous five-year term of the re-elected president, he considered that France was in a situation “much more fragile than we believe”. This melody is regularly sung by François Hollande who, on many occasions, has expressed his skepticism about the mode of governance and the decisions of Emmanuel Macron. He even described the latter as a “kind of default choice” because of the “lack of alternative” during his Grand interview with France Inter October 20, 2021. If François Hollande recognized the “pragmatism” of his successor, he also deplored his “lack of doctrine”. “A country needs to have a meaning, a vision,” insisted the former head of state.
In Confront, published by Editions Stock in 2021, François Hollande wrote: “it appeared to me that social dialogue was neither one of Emmanuel Macron’s priorities nor his methods of reform”. In this very transparent book, he admitted that he “still does not know” what the representative of LREM “believes four years later”, regretting his lack of a fixed ideology, of a political dream: “it changes according to the color of the sky”. Then, the former president had a few words for Emmanuel Macron’s reform record, deemed “rarely thin”, as well as for his responsibilities: “he is a president who has torn the French people apart”. In this book, he represents him above all as “the standard-bearer of a technocracy often ignorant of the real life of the French”. This type of confession has become a habit for François Hollande, he who had tackled the theme of Emmanuel Macron’s betrayal in his previous book, lessons of powerpublished in 2018 and sold more than 120,000 copies in large format.
Despite these differences, François Hollande does not make himself the enemy of Emmanuel Macron. A few days before the second round of the 2022 presidential election, François Hollande officially called on the French to vote for Emmanuel Macron during his appearance at 8 p.m. on TF1. He had justified this choice in the name of “the cohesion of France”, of “its European future and its independence”. The importance for him was to block the candidacy of Marine Le Pen, she who, according to him, would have “challenged our principles and our values”. A few days earlier, the former head of state Nicolas Sarkozy had done the same, arousing strong reactions in the camp of the Republicans.
François Hollande joined the PS in 1979. He was first adviser to François Mitterrand, then project manager for economic issues. From 1983, he held local (in Corrèze in Limousin) and parliamentary mandates. In 1994, he notably became first secretary and spokesperson for the PS. As a member of the European Parliament, he declared himself in favor of the European Constitution in 2002, thus opposing the number 2 of the Party, Laurent Fabius. Therefore, the PS appears divided in the eyes of the French. During the presidential election of 2007, he chose to step aside in favor of his partner Ségolène Royal. On the other hand, the presidential election of 2012 will propel him to the front of the stage, since at the end of the citizens’ primary, he was nominated candidate of the PS.
On May 15, 2012, François Hollande becomes the 24th President of the Republic. He obtained 28.63% of the votes in the first round then 51.64% of the votes against outgoing President Nicolas Sarkozy. He appoints Jean-Marc Ayrault as prime minister. The president’s popularity rating fell over the months, falling below the 20% mark in January 2014. During the reshuffle announced after the defeat of the socialist party in the municipal elections of the same year, François Hollande decided to elect Manuel Valls to head of the new government. On May 7, 2017, Emmanuel Macron succeeded him as President of the French Republic.