Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande attacks Nicolas Sarkozy for wooing far-right vote and using state ressources on unofficial campaign.
Four days after delivering a rousing performance of lofty rhetoric in a keynote speech to supporters at Le Bourget last Sunday, Socialist Party presidential candidate François Hollande has finally presented his policy programme. At a sobre press conference on Thursday, the current frontrunner appeared more concerned about demonstrating his economic competence than with “battling the world of finance”, the promise he made to the cheering party faithful last weekend. Lénaïg Bredoux and Stéphane Alliès report.
With less than 90 days to go before the French presidential elections, Socialist Party candidate François Hollande remains the frontrunner in what most observers predict will be a two-horse race with outgoing President, yet still undeclared candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. Hollande’s companion, French journalist Valérie Trierweiler (pictured with Hollande), little-known to the public, has until now played a low-profile in the elections, while continuing her professional activities. Yet she has her own personal office at Hollande’s campaign HQ. Mathilde Mathieu and Michaël Hajdenberg have been trying, not without difficulty, to find out more about the true role of she who would be France’s next First Lady.
With 100 days to go before the first round of the French presidential elections, Socialist Party candidate François Hollande (pictured) is still baffling observers and rivals alike. In the wings for over a year now, Hollande has pulled off a tour de force by imposing his slow tempo on the political debate, displaying a singular virtuosity in the art of fuzziness. Stéphane Alliès takes a closer look at the strategy of the man who hopes to become France's first socialist president since 1995.
France’s blue collar workers, junior white-collar staff, the unemployed and the retired make up a lower class that is also the majority among the country’s electorate. Hit hardest by the current economic crisis, and largely ignored by the traditional Left, there are consistent indicators that a significant proportion is being won over by the Far Right Front National party presidential candidate, Marine Le Pen. In this interview with Mediapart, social geographer Christophe Guilluy offers an insight into an economic and social groundshift in France that has produced an abandoned and despairing category of the population, what he calls “a new lower class which the Left does not really understand”.
