Emmanuel Macron’s challenge for French lesbians

The man who brought France’s Socialist Party to the brink of ruin has no sense of shame. In recent weeks, François Hollande has been plugging his memoirs all over the media and even hinting at a political comeback, much to the “exasperation” of his party, who wish the former president would go quietly into the night.

The book, The lessons of Power, is rumoured to have been written with the help of a well-known left-wing journalist, but the delusions are all Hollande’s. His bitterness towards Emmanuel Macron seeps through the prose, and for every swipe at his successor there is also a claim that France’s gradual economic upturn is down to his policies. He admits to one or two errors, notably his lack of “boldness” in not expanding the country’s medically assisted procreation [PMA] law to include lesbian couples and single mothers. Currently the law restricts the practice to heterosexual couples of childbearing age.

On the other hand, Hollande cites as one of his finest achievements the passing of the same sex marriage and adoption bill in 2013; his conservative critics demur. As the expert on French Islam, Gilles Kepel, has commented, the bill achieved the rare feat of allying Muslims “with the Catholics of the right and anti-gays by way of their shared values”.

Not only did more than a million people take to the street to voice their opposition to the bill but they also expressed their disapproval at the ballot box. In the second round of the 2012 election – a year before the same sex marriage bill came into law – 93 per cent of the Muslim electorate voted for Hollande over Nicolas Sarkozy. At the time, the director of one of France’s top polling organisations cautioned the new president against taking the Muslim vote for granted because they are very conservative on some issues, “for example, homosexuality, which they reject en bloc”.