François Hollande is back - and he’s breaking France

It was an uncharacteristically outlandish move for the man who prided himself on being “President Normal”.

Ten years after leaving the Élysée as the most unpopular French head of state in postwar history, François Hollande was making his comeback in Tulle, where he was once mayor.

“It’s an exceptional decision for an exceptional moment,” the 69-year-old said after declaring he was running for the southwestern constituency of Corrèze in France’s snap Assembly elections.

It was yet another surprise in the week after Marine Le Pen’s landslide victory over Emmanuel Macron in the European Parliament elections on Sunday June 9.

That very night Mr Macron dissolved the National Assembly and challenged France to end its flirtation with the hard-Right.

It’s a huge gamble, which could leave Mr Macron a lame-duck president with a National Rally prime minister running France if Ms Le Pen wins a majority.

Mr Macron hoped to force the centre-Left and centre-Right to join him in a new coalition and exile the extreme parties.

The Republicans, the Right-wing heir to the party of Charles De Gaulle, promptly imploded in a row over whether or not to join forces with Ms Le Pen.

Bitter infighting also erupted within Eric Zemmour’s far-Right party Reconquest after star member Marion Maréchal, Ms Le Pen’s niece, called for an alliance with the National Rally.

But on the Left, opposition was coalescing against Mr Macron in an uneasy marriage of convenience to stop the hard-Right.

After four days of intense negotiations, the New Popular Front was born on June 13 and will run a shared list of candidates in the two rounds of voting on June 30 and July 7.

It is dominated by the hard-Left France Unbowed party (LFI), led by the combustible Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and includes the Greens, the Communists and the Socialist Party.

“There are definite questions about how cohesive this bloc will be,” said Kate Parker, an expert in French politics at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

“Mélenchon is a loose cannon. He’s hot-tempered, divisive. Yes, he’s charismatic, but that comes with a downside as well.”

For now the differences have been patched over. Mr Mélenchon, who is soft on Putin and Hamas, has made clear he would not try to become prime minister if the group won the elections.

The Front supports military aid to Ukraine, supports an arms embargo on Israel, and rejects Macron’s efforts to cut the deficit and his unpopular pensions reforms.

Mr Mélenchon purged the LFI of some of his most vocal critics as he drew up the list of his candidates in a characteristic power move.

Mr Hollande was not yet a candidate for the Socialists, the establishment centre-Left party he once led.

As president, he was a laughing stock after being photographed on the back of a three-wheeled moped, taking breakfast croissants to his film star lover Julie Gayet, who is now his wife.

France’s betrayed premiere dame, Valérie Trierweiler, later took her revenge for l’affaire du scooter with a bombshell memoir about her betrayal.

Mr Hollande’s unpopularity reached record lows, as France faced rising unemployment and the threat of Islamic terrorism.

The Socialists and Republicans swapped power for years until Mr Macron turned French politics upside down before 2017’s presidential elections.

Breaking French politics

Mr Macron, then Mr Hollande’s economics minister, formed his own centrist party and announced he would run for president.

As Socialist and Republican heavyweights flocked to Mr Macron, their parties were left shadows of their former selves and the Left and Right was abandoned to the extremes.

Mr Hollande decided not to run for a second term, and shuffled off into the wilderness, until last Thursday.

“There is a moment when we go beyond the differences, we go to the essential,” he said, as he gave the New Popular Front his blessing, despite his antipathy towards Mr Mélenchon.

He was not asked if he planned to stand himself. Only one former French president has ever won a seat in the Assembly after leaving the Élysée.

But he had already begun secret negotiations with old contacts in Corrèze, without the knowledge of party leader Olivier Faure, to return to his old stomping ground.

Bernard Combes, the mayor of Tulle, was meant to get the nomination but stepped down in favour of Mr Hollande.

Mr Faure, who thought he had long since killed off all the “old elephants” of his rebranded party, was forced to admit that he was blindsided by the coup.

On Saturday, as thousands marched across France against the hard Right, Mr Hollande ventured into the market at Tulle to shake hands and blow kisses in scenes that could have come from the campaign trail more than a decade ago.

An end to old grudges

“Any reinforcements are welcome to fight the National Rally,” Mr Mélenchon said. “I’m throwing my grudge into the river, and I hope he does the same.”

“We didn’t believe it at first,” Ali Can, spokesman for LFI in Corrèze, told The Telegraph. “When it was confirmed, there were a lot of negative reactions. There are a lot of voters who have not forgotten Hollande’s five-year term, for whom it remains painful.”

He said LFI would temporarily support Mr Hollande to stop the far-Right if he toed the party line, which includes repealing Mr Macron’s raising of the retirement age to 64.

“Mr Hollande is getting cosy with the worst of the extreme-Left, which is anti-Semite, violent and abject,” Valéry Elophe, departmental delegate of the National Rally in Corrèze, said. “This man is disgraceful.”

Mr Hollande’s move damaged Mr Macron’s election strategy. Mr Hollande was no hard-Leftist.

Nevertheless, Mr Macron told his aides to treat Hollande as an ally of Mélenchon’s extremists.

The presidential bloc was not fielding a candidate in Corrèze.

In a Monday morning interview, Macron’s Prime Minister Gabriel Attal urged voters there to back the Republican candidate instead of Mr Hollande.

Meanwhile, the Socialists are in a better place than they have been for years after Mr Macron veered to the Right to outflank Mrs Le Pen’s National Rally, This has created space on the centre-Left.

In Raphaël Glucksmann, a Jewish MEP, they finally have a viable alternative to Mr Macron. Young, intellectual and charismatic, he led the Socialists to victory over Mr Macron in the European elections.

National Rally are predicted to win a 33 per cent share of the first round Assembly vote, followed by the New Popular Front on 28 per cent, with the president’s party lagging far behind on 18 per cent.

The Socialists are running fewer candidates than LFI but could win more seats, putting them in the driving seat if the Front can hold together for the 18 days before the end of the elections.

The compromise candidate?

Mr Hollande has given up the cosy life of a retired president. But he never forgave Mr Macron’s betrayal and believes he broke France’s political system.

Could he emerge as an unlikely compromise prime minister after the elections?

He may plan to run in the 2027 presidential elections, which Mr Macron cannot contest.

“I have no ambition other than to serve the country,” Mr Hollande says.

In April, an opinion poll ranked him as the second most popular politician in France. At one point in 2017, he had an approval rating of just 4 per cent.

“When you average out the unpopularity of yesterday and today’s popularity, I’m at the normal level,” he said, in a knowing nod to his “President Normal” tag.