François Hollande’s decision not to stand for a second term, the first time since the war that a French president has not bid for re-election, was greeted with a mixture of admiration and scorn by the country’s neighbours – and stinging criticism of his record.
In Germany, the Süddeutsche Zeitung argued that Hollande’s defeat recalled the fate of two other social democratic “changers”, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, both of whom once pushed through painful structural changes that ran counter to their parties’ instincts and were abandoned by voters as a consequence.
“But Hollande’s record is far more bitter,” the newspaper wrote. “He too had to put up with large swaths of the French left labelling him the Socialists’ gravedigger, because of his neoliberal reforms. But he got nothing in return: France’s economy failed to restart … and the unemployed remained on the streets.”
The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said Hollande would leave behind a “field of leftwing destruction”. It added that he had “staged his abdication like a republican monarch”, declaring he would “prefer to hand the history of France on to someone else”.
In Switzerland, Le Temps was kinder, saying the embattled Hollande had opted to “abdicate with dignity”, aware of the risks a second candidacy would have posed to “French political debate, the left, and France’s image in the world”.
The paper said Hollande’s record low approval rating – 4% in October – meant that a man who was determined on his election in 2012 to be a “normal” president had actually become “abnormal”. Ironically, it said, his decision “makes him more presidential than he ever was” as president.
Belgium’s Le Soir said that after the primary defeats of centre-right candidates Alain Juppé and Nicolas Sarkozy, Hollande was the third “dinosaur” of French politics to depart the scene in recent weeks, “symbol of a zeitgeist that wants change at all cost and rejects the current model, whatever it is”.
The president’s decision not to stand was “without doubt the only honourable way out, in order to avoid an unprecedented defeat in the first round of the election or even in the left-wing primary”, the newspaper said.
But it added that Hollande would leave behind “a mess”. The president who promised a France “less divided, on a path to economic recovery, made many mistakes. He has been a major disappointment. He accomplished a few, mainly social reforms – but he leaves a country on edge, and a left in tatters.”
