The NY Times Discovers Hollande, Future President ‘By Default’

Francois Hollande was suffering from a serious lack of notoriety abroad, particularly in the United States. Eight days [before] the first round, the New York Times began to warn the American elite about the man who “is set to become president of France.”

For the first time, a lengthy portrait was dedicated to a socialist candidate in the New York Times, and his picture appears in one of the huge world editions of the International Herald Tribune (IHT).

An uncompromising portrait signed by Steven Erlanger, the American newspaper correspondent in Paris, recalls his pejorative nickname of “Flanby.” (He adds the American version, a “living marshmallow.”) It also recalls that Martine Aubry called him openly a member of the “soft left” and even — this is from the IHT — a “spineless wimp” in French translation of the text….

In America, Hollande “Saw Potential”

But it is to pinpoint the paradox of this man on whom nobody would have bet, but who finds himself “at the top by default,” as says the title of the Herald Tribune, because of the episode with Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Note that the title of the U.S. edition is different. It is “The Soft Middle of Francois Hollande,” which can be translated as a “soft center” if we’re mean or a “tender or padded center” if we’re nice…

To the New York Times reporter he met in Marseille, Francois Hollande recounted a little known story of an American youth:

“And in 1974, he got a travel grant from business school to go to the United States for the summer, studying the supreme American invention of fast food — particularly McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which hadn’t yet established themselves in France. He drove from New York to San Francisco in what he remembered as ‘a very difficult period for the United States.’ ‘Nixon was being pursued,’ he said, ‘the dollar was very low, there was a doubt about America, the exit from Vietnam, but I saw the potential.'”

He wrote a report saying that fast food would come to France. “I could have made a fortune in cheeseburgers, but I finally chose politics,” he said when I spoke with him in Marseille. And here his girlfriend, the journalist Valérie Trierweiler, interjected, with a small sigh: “And since then he has kept a certain taste for hamburgers.”

The Return to “Traditional” Political Life?

In addition to the story, the reporter from the New York Times notes that the assumed “normality” of François Hollande could mark a return to “traditional” political life in France, after the parenthesis of the atypical Nicolas Sarkozy, with his language and his unpredictability.

Steven Erlanger noted that the Socialist candidate needs to go beyond the leftists if he wants to win, and therefore to the center.

He noted that Hollande will win against Sarkozy, who is subject to a widespread rejection by the French public, but without provoking “passion.”

Francois Hollande did not move in. He tells the New York Times reporter that the public makes the man, and, as Mitterrand long underestimated, “In a moment, you are invested, you incarnate France — that changes everything.”

Americans are cautious, especially Barack Obama, who amiably chatted with Nicolas Sarkozy about their respective chances of victory in a highly publicized exchange that took place via video-conference a few days ago.