[Caught in a clandestine affair that is more bedroom farce than Shakespearean drama — a beautiful actress, a scorned woman at home, surreptitious comings and goings on a most unpresidential scooter — Mr. Hollande is testing the limits of France’s tolerance for private indiscretion and leaving himself vulnerable to ridicule.]
By Elaine Sciolino, Alissa J. Rubin
And Maïa De La Baume
 |
Yoan
Valat/European Pressphoto Agency
A television
in a Paris bar shows President Hollande at a news conference.
He faces the task of preventing his affair from undermining his economic goals. |
PARIS — As a
candidate for the French presidency in 2012, François Hollande promised to be
more boring spouse than flamboyant seducer.
Determined to set himself apart from the man he was seeking to
unseat — Nicolas Sarkozy, whose marriage to the former supermodel Carla Bruni
had helped make him tabloid fodder — Mr. Hollande proclaimed, “I, president of
the republic, will make sure that my behavior is exemplary at every moment.”
Twenty months into his presidency, Mr. Hollande’s campaign
pledge is faring even less well than the unemployment-cursed French economy.
Caught in a clandestine affair that is more bedroom farce than
Shakespearean drama — a beautiful actress, a scorned woman at home,
surreptitious comings and goings on a most unpresidential scooter — Mr.
Hollande is testing the limits of France’s tolerance for private indiscretion
and leaving himself vulnerable to ridicule.
The episode has revealed a colder, more politically calculating
side to Mr. Hollande, familiar to those around him but largely hidden from
public view. His judgment, not least about his personal security, has been
called into question.
Already weighed down by historically low support in the polls,
he also faces the challenge of keeping the affair from undercutting his ability
to push through an ambitious new agenda aimed at restoring France’s fading
global competitiveness and moving his Socialist Party to the center.
One big test could come next month, when he will travel to
Washington for a state visit with President Obama. Mr. Hollande’s official
partner, Valérie Trierweiler, was scheduled to accompany him in her role as de
facto first lady, but now the visit seems likely to attract considerable
attention for his eventual choice of, or lack of, a traveling companion.
“He’s always hated when politics turned into a spectacle, and
now he finds himself right in the middle of one,” Julien Dray, a prominent
Socialist, said in an interview. “The question is how he will handle it over
the long term. If this becomes vaudeville, it could damage his presidency.”
Mr. Hollande, 59, has had little respite since a magazine,
Closer, caught him meeting at an apartment around the corner from the Élysée
Palace with Julie Gayet, a 41-year-old film actress who has played roles as
varied as a Foreign Ministry official, a hairdresser and an addict, with nude
scenes. The magazine published pictures of him arriving for his trysts on a
scooter, wearing a helmet with the visor down, but apparently recognizable by
his sensible black lace-up shoes.
Members of the French public at first took the revelations in
their usual sexually sophisticated stride, but not Ms. Trierweiler. People who
know her well said she was so devastated by the news that she checked herself
into a hospital.
Mr. Hollande visited only once during her eight-day stay. Since
leaving the hospital over the weekend (and thanking supporters via Twitter for their
good wishes), she has been resting at La Lanterne, the presidential getaway at
Versailles. Paris Match, where Ms. Trierweiler has remained employed as a
journalist even while serving as Mr. Hollande’s official consort, reported on its website that the
president had asked her for more time.
Mr. Hollande said Monday in a news conference in the Netherlands
that Ms. Trierweiler was “getting better,” but he did not respond to the
question of whether she was France’s first lady, according to reports by news
services.
If he does leave her, it will be his second high-profile breakup
in seven years, after the end of his 25-year relationship with Ségolène Royal,
a Socialist Party presidential candidate in 2007 and the mother of their four
children.
Mr. Hollande’s personal drama was playing out over the past two
weeks as he was making one of the most substantive decisions of his term so
far, proposing to cut corporate
taxes and reduce public spending, moves that unnerved the left wing
of his Socialist Party but also drew plaudits from the business world.
The confluence of the two story lines made Mr. Hollande, who had
been caricatured as wobbly as a popular French custard, into a more complex
figure.
To his supporters, this is the start of a new chapter for Mr.
Hollande in which he is emerging as a more mature and pragmatic leader who may
be freed from what had become a complicated relationship with Ms. Trierweiler.
They are banking on the assumption that what would be a media
circus to an American president will be treated as a sideshow by the French,
and that the story will die down.
“There is a new Hollande, more in harmony with himself,” said
one of his close friends.
Much will depend on what happens in the coming weeks, especially
whether Ms. Trierweiler speaks publicly. As Mr. Hollande toured his political
constituency of Tulle in central France over the weekend, he was trailed by 90
reporters, almost all French. He declined to answer the few questions that were
posed about his personal life.
But more than his predecessors in the pre-Twitter era, who could
count on journalists to keep most private behavior by public officials out of
the limelight, Mr. Hollande now finds himself operating in a climate of more
intensive and intrusive scrutiny.
Perhaps more worrisome for him is that potentially his support
among women could erode.
“This makes the French
look like idiots,” said Arlette da Rocha, who runs the restaurant Le Pressoir
in Tulle, where Mr. Hollande started his political career. “He has to tell the
truth. This unconventional behavior in his private life doesn’t give a clean
image of the president.”
Mr. Hollande long seems to have assumed that he could live by
his own rules.
As leader of the Socialist Party, he campaigned for Ms. Royal
when she ran for president in 2007. Both of them hid the fact that he had
already left her for Ms. Trierweiler. French journalists who knew about the
breakup did not write about it until Ms. Royal announced it after the election.
“He who has betrayed will betray,” Ms. Royal said afterward.
Mr. Hollande has never been the marrying kind — a rarity for
high-ranking politicians, although not for many French couples. Not that Ms.
Royal was unwilling to tie the knot. Asked about marriage in a joint television
interview in 2006 during the prelude to her presidential campaign, she replied
mischievously: “We love each other, so I’m expecting him to propose. François,
do you want to marry me?”
Mr. Hollande chuckled, awkwardly, and said nothing.
“You see — he still hesitates!” Ms. Royal said.
“No, this is not what I mean,” Mr. Hollande said. “I’ll answer
you after the program.”
Apparently his answer was no.
Mr. Hollande never married Ms. Trierweiler, even though he
described her in an interview with Gala magazine in October 2010 as “the woman
of my life.” By the following February, he had curbed his enthusiasm. “The
sentence was maladroit,” he said. “I should have said, ‘She is the woman of my
life today.’ ”
Not only did he not marry Ms. Trierweiler when he became
president, he also agreed that she could keep working for Paris Match, although
she stopped covering politics. Mr. Hollande and his aides depicted it as an
example of a modern partnership rather than a conflict of interest. She was
installed as the de facto first lady with offices in the east wing of the
Élysée Palace, a staff of four and a monthly budget of about $27,000.
Early in his presidency, he wanted the freedom to move in and
out of the Élysée Palace as he pleased. In “So Far, Everything’s Going Badly,”
a new book on the Hollande presidency, the author, Cécile Amar, said that
shortly after Mr. Hollande was elected, he asked members of the Élysée staff,
“How do I get out without people seeing me?”
Concerned that he might try to escape the Élysée on his motor
scooter, his aides sold it, Ms. Amar wrote.
He took the high-speed train to a European summit meeting in
Brussels against the wishes of his security staff, and insisted on living
mostly in the apartment he shares with Ms. Trierweiler — with large exposed bay
windows — which had to be secured.
He quickly made some concessions: He stopped taking trains and
abandoned his pledge that his motorcade would stop at red lights like ordinary
motorists (an obvious security risk).
But he still believes he knows best about his security. “I go
around when and where I want as I want,” he said at his news conference last
week.
Interviews with more than a dozen friends and political
colleagues suggest that Mr. Hollande often deflects deeper questions about his
character.
“He is very difficult to read,” said François Rebsamen, a close
friend, the mayor of Dijon and a member of the Senate, in an interview. “He’s
very affable, bubbly, lively, with a quick mind and great intelligence. But
he’s also a very closed person. The true Hollande has revealed himself in the
past few days. He’s 100 percent politics. Nothing comes before that. He loves
it. He is married to politics.”
People describe him as having a good sense of humor, being a
good listener and making shrewd political judgments. But these traits alone do
not fully capture him.
Mr. Hollande once confessed his unwillingness or inability to
reveal himself. “You ask me who I am,” he said in a news conference last May,
replying to a narrow question about his political ideology in broader terms.
“That’s a terrible question.”
Scott Sayare contributed reporting.
