François Hollande appears to have been consigned to the political mortuary. The first Socialist French president since François Mitterrand has been more unpopular than any of his predecessors in office — his approval rating sank to 13 per cent towards the end of last year.
His style of government has been ridiculed. His private life has been the subject of mockery. He is compared to a hapless captain of a pedalo navy or a wobbly French pudding, a Flanby.
But don’t write off Flanby just yet. Thanks to the peculiarity of French presidential elections, he may well win a second term. In order to understand how, it helps to go back to the election of 2002, when the first ballot set up a run-off between the conservative incumbent, Jacques Chirac, and Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front. The Socialist candidate, prime minister Lionel Jospin, had been edged out. It was a seminal moment in French politics.
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