A President Should Not Say That

Just when President François Hollande’s chances for re-election next year appeared as low as they could ever get, they fell even lower still after the publication last week of a book of interviews in which he launches a series of scathing attacks on a wide number of people ranging from the judiciary to footballers, his political opponents to his allies, and the rebels on the Left of his Socialist Party. Amid the outrage caused by his comments, Hollande’s remaining allies in the party view the book as the last straw in a long-running series of blunders that now make him, in the words of one socialist senator, “indefensible”. Lénaïg Bredoux and Christophe Gueugneau report on the fury and dismay of socialist MPs and members of government.

A book published in France this week presents a long series of ‘fireside’ conversations over several years between President François Hollande and two journalists from French daily Le Monde . The book, Un président ne devrait pas dire ça (“A president shouldn’t say that…”), has caused a storm of controversy, notably over Hollande’s attacks on the “cowardly” higher ranks of the French judiciary and which prompted an embarrassed admission of "regret" by the president on Friday over his comments. But, Mediapart investigative journalists Fabrice Arfi and Mathilde Mathieu argue here, the book is especially revelatory of Hollande’s surprising approach to the catalogue of corruption scams which have shaken the French political establishment over recent years.  For he evidently regards them more in terms of their electoral consequences or the negative fallout upon himself than scandals that raise grave concern over the absence of probity in French politics.