François Hollande
François Hollande was President of France from 2012 to 2017 and left office with the lowest approval rating on record. Born in Rouen in 1954, the son of an ear, nose and throat doctor with far-right sympathies and a social worker, he passed through HEC, Sciences Po and the ENA, and worked as a court auditor before entering politics. He spent decades as an organiser rather than a minister — mayor of Tulle, deputy for Corrèze, and first secretary of the Socialist Party for eleven years — and had never held a government post when he was elected president. He campaigned as Mr Normal in explicit contrast to Nicolas Sarkozy, and declared that his real enemy was finance. His term was dominated by things he did not choose. Terrorist attacks killed some 250 people between January 2015 and July 2016 — Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan and the Paris attacks, the Nice lorry — and he imposed a state of emergency that lasted two years. His attempt to strip convicted terrorists of citizenship split his own party and was abandoned. He legalised same-sex marriage in 2013 against very large demonstrations, intervened in Mali to stop a jihadist advance, and hosted the conference that produced the Paris climate agreement in 2015. Unemployment stayed above ten per cent for most of the term, and the labour law reform of 2016 was forced through without a vote and produced months of protest. His private life was covered relentlessly. He declined to seek a second term — the first president of the Fifth Republic to do so — and returned to the National Assembly in 2024.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: French
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
