François Hollande hopes to make the French left electable again

François Hollande hopes to make the French left electable again

François Hollande hopes to make the French left electable again

THREE YEARS ago the French Socialist Party was crushed into irrelevance. The party that supplied two modern presidents—François Mitterrand (1981-95) and François Hollande (2012-17)—and nine prime ministers, became as invisible in parliament as in public debate. Its presidential candidate in 2022, Anne Hidalgo, was beaten into a dismal tenth place, scraping together less than 2% of the vote. Its contingent in the National Assembly was swallowed up into a left-wing alliance dominated by the hard left’s firebrand leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He engineered the downfall of the previous French government, under Michel Barnier, in December.

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