François Hollande: The Presidency at an Impasse

As Pierre-Emmanuel Guigo explains in his chapter, the mandate of François Hollande coincided with a significantly different set of challenges. In 2012, Nicolas Sarkozy failed to be re-elected after five years of opinion-dividing policies. The Socialist Party came back to power after ten years spent in the opposition. Hollande’s presidency saw the most important terrorist attacks in the history of France in January and November 2015 and in July 2016. Hollande became unpopular quite fast and was broadly contested inside his own party and parliamentary majority. After 2014, the “frondeurs” rejected his economic policies as too liberal, while the centre flank of his party regrouped around his visibly dissenting second Prime Minister, Manuel Valls. Facing such contestation, Hollande decided not to run for a second term in 2017. He is the first and, to this day, the sole incumbent President to have done so under the Fifth Republic.