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May 15th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Other nicknames, “trickster” or “Chinese”, give Mr Hollande’s game away, that
of an implacably ambitious man with a thick skin and ingrained survival
instincts who quietly triumphs over his adversaries.
He was born in 1954 in Bois-Guillaume, a respectable middle-class suburb of
Rouen in Northern France. It was a difficult childhood. Georges Hollande,
his father, was a doctor involved in extreme right-wing politics and prone
to harsh and whimsical treatment of his two sons, Philippe and François.
In 1968, when Hollande was 13, his father, at the time publicly hoping that a
military dictatorship was about to crush rebellious left-wing students,
moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, later the home turf and power base of Nicolas
Sarkozy. During the move, Georges Hollande threw out all his two sons’
possessions, comics, books and posters, including François’s beloved
collection of Dinky Toys.
While his older brother was sent to a strict boarding school in punishment for
open rebellion, François learned to keep his head down while quietly
rejecting his highly conservative upbringing. Serge Raffy, Mr Hollande’s
biographer, observed that he learnt to avoid conflict while pursuing his own
agenda. “It was his only way to survive,” he wrote.
In contrast to his father, Mr Hollande’s mother, Nicole, was a kind presence,
a social worker who pushed her son in the direction of his moderate
centre-Left namesake François Mitterrand, who was later his mentor and the
first Socialist French President of the Fifth Republic.
School friends remember Mr Hollande as a smiling, plump teenager with glasses
and, while no one took him seriously or believed him for a moment, a sense
of destiny. “I will be president of the Republic,” he told Jean-Louis
Audran, a class mate.
Showing his ambition, Mr Hollande’s education took him to the elite École
Nationale d’Administration, or ENA, where he joined the ranks of énarques
who run the French state and form the highest cadre of the political class.
There in 1978 he met Ségolène Royal, forging a political and romantic
partnership that was to last 27 years, a period when the couple became two
of the most powerful figures in the Socialist Party.
In 1981 when Mr Mitterrand swept to power Mr Hollande was sent by him to
challenge an up and coming Jacques Chirac, later to be French president
himself, in the parliamentary seat of Corrèze in the heart of “France
profonde”, deep in the central and southern provinces, hours and hundreds of
miles from Paris.
Mr Chirac, who roundly trounced him in the election, quipped: “They send me an
opponent no more well-known than President Mitterrand’s Labrador.”
Unusually, the ambitious young Socialist did not return to Paris, choosing
instead to stay in the provincial backwater for seven years before winning
the seat in 1988. He was re-elected in 1997, 2002 and 2007. In a twist of
fate and as a reward for Mr Hollande’s doggedness, Mr Chirac defied tribal
politics to back him in the 2012 presidential race.
Mr Hollande could have taken on Mr Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election
but luckily chose to stay in the background, allowing his partner Ms Royal
to try her luck in a contest where defeat and humiliation for any Socialist
candidate was probably inevitable.
His discipline was such that he and Ms Royal, with whom he had four children,
kept the break-up of their relationship secret until the vote was safely
over. He had left her for another woman, his current partner Valerie
Trierweiler, a political journalist.
Ms Trierweiler, 47, transformed Mr Hollande from a figure of ridicule to the
first, serious Socialist contender for the French presidency in three
decades. Under her tutelage, he lost 22 pounds in politically unpalatable
podginess and adopted thinner-framed glasses to give his face a meaner and
leaner look.
It was she, a year ago, who woke him to break the news that Dominique Strauss
Kahn, the charismatic IMF chief anointed as the Socialist favourite, was
doomed after being arrested for rape. She was also there to help him in the
internal Socialist battle that followed. Shrugging off the insults of his
comrades and showing a new steely competence, Mr Hollande triumphed.
Despite the makeover, his reserves of quiet ambition and dogged grit, Mr
Hollande has not been able to shed his true political character as a
technocrat, albeit one who has learnt to empathise with voters. He has
ability, stock in trade of any French politician, to evoke the legacies of
the French Revolution and the Résistance. But then he is quickly bogged down
in technical detail, prone to hackneyed phrases and jargon.
Again fate has been kind. Mr Hollande has been able to use his defects,
serious but uninspiring, to give the impression of being more presidential
than the flighty and colourfully erratic President Sarkozy. After a life of
quietly swallowing the insults, Mr Hollande’s childhood destiny has finally
arrived.
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