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April 20th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
If he pulls it off, it will crown a career spent largely in the shadows of
other, more charismatic political heavyweights.
He claims otherwise, but Mr Hollande’s candidacy is an electoral accident.
Last year, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister and then IMF
chief, was clear favourite to win Socialist primaries.
Even the woman Mr Sarkozy beat in the last elections, Ségolène Royal, Mr
Hollande’s former companion and mother of their four children, asked
recently: “Can the French people name a single thing he has achieved in
30 years in politics?”
But rape allegations put an end to Mr Strauss-Kahn’s electoral hopes while Mr
Hollande’s ex-partner crashed out of the Socialist leadership contest in
tears.
Mr Hollande has gone on to win support as the electoral antidote to the flashy
Mr Sarkozy. “He doesn’t create fervour, it’s something else,” said
François Dubois, 49, a supporter at the Bordeaux rally.
He certainly lacks the stirring delivery of Mr Sarkozy or Jean-Luc Mélenchon,
the Communist-backed candidate whose promise of “civic revolution”
has transfixed supporters. But his chirpy good humour can still work a
crowd.
“In a time of crisis, we need people who care about the people before
their friends, other interests or the rich, like Sarkozy does. Hollande
brings that human dimension,” he said.
He has played to his Left by singling out “finance” as his “worst
enemy” and pledging to soak the rich with a 75 per cent tax on annual
earnings over a million euros and to create 60,000 jobs in state education.
But centrists seem happy with his promise to balance the budget by 2017.
A product of France’s elitist Ecole Nationale d’Adminstration, l’ENA, Mr
Hollande has never held a ministerial post. He ran the Socialist party for a
decade, presiding over a string of regional political victories for the
Left, but also disaster in 2002 when the Socialist’s presidential candidate,
Lionel Jospin, was knocked out by the far-Right Jean-Marie Le Pen in round
one.
Supporters say he kept the party together as a consensus builder, but critics
called him chronically indecisive, leading to the nickname of “The big
bad softie”.
But Mr Hollande has also quietly built a political power base in the
cattle-breeding Corrèze department in central France – where he is now MP.
In 1981, the fresh-faced 26-year-old was sent there on a seemingly impossible
mission: to take on Mr Chirac.
When the Gaullist saw Mr Hollande at the train station, suitcase in hand, he
said: “They send me an opponent no more well known than President
Mitterrand’s labrador.”
But it is precisely this type of unassuming leader that France appears to
want, and even Mr Chirac now backs his erstwhile rival.
The latest polls published yesterday before a 24-hour blackout suggest Mr
Hollande is likely to come first in round one.
But with a quarter of voters undecided and record expected abstention levels
that have notoriously upset the polls in the past, the Socialist urged
voters not to assume it was game over.
Meanwhile, the demoralised Sarkozy camp hopes the country will wake up after
the first round and realise that they have a simple choice to rein in
France’s debt and deficit: cut spending with the Right, or raise taxes with
the Left.
Mr Sarkozy is pinning his hopes on coming first in round one and landing a
knock out punch in a lone televised debate between the two rounds.
Mr Sarkozy’s dire warnings, repeated yesterday, that France will go the way of
Spain or Greece should it relax spending cuts have so far fallen on deaf
ears. Voters appear to prefer Mr Hollande’s plan to shirk austerity and add
a growth chapter to the European fiscal pact, which he claims even some
conservative EU leaders privately welcome. In Bordeaux, he claimed a victory
in France would give “hope” to the rest of Europe.
A contrite Mr Sarkozy began Friday apologising for the perceived mistakes of
his term in office.
“Perhaps the mistake I made at the start of my mandate is not understanding
the symbolic dimension of the president’s role and not being solemn enough
in my acts,” he said.
“A mistake for which I would like to apologise or explain myself and which I
will not make again,” he said, insisting: “Now, I know the job.”
Mr Hollande was quick to seize on the remarks, saying his opponent’s mea culpa
was too little, too late.
“I won’t wait until the end of my term to say I made mistakes at the
beginning. That’s too late. I will try to adopt the proper behaviour, if the
French give me the chance, right from the start.
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