What to expect from François Hollande

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As you know, François Hollande won the French presidency yesterday with a second-round run-off win over incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.

It was close. Hollande received the most votes in the first round, held on April 21-22, but fell well short of a majority, winning 28.63 percent of the vote. Sarkozy was second with 27.18, followed by National Front leader Marine le Pen with 17.90. Fourth was leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon with 11.10, fifth was right-leaning centrist François Bayrou with 9.13. Five other candidates received at least 0.25 percent of the vote. (Check out the map, color-coded by commune winner, here.)

(I was actually in France on holiday on April 21-22. It didn't feel like an election was going on, maybe because everyone was expected a run-off. Very low-key, some small billboards here and there with the faces of the major candidates.)

Basically, the right won more votes than the left in the first round, but while most of the left coalesced behind Hollande, Sarkozy didn't pick up enough of le Pen's support to put him over the top. (To be fair, it was a tough task for the president, as he had to move right in a hurry to appeal to the fascists while also trying to secure more of the center from Bayrou.) The second-round result was Hollande 51.67, Sarkozy 48.33.

Now... Sarkozy is center-right, both pro-American and pro-German, and generally supportive of the austerity measures that are supposed to solve Europe's fiscal crisis, while Hollande is a socialist. So what can we expect from the new president? What will change?

As the Times reports, "Hollande campaigned on a gentler and more inclusive France, but his victory will also be seen as a challenge to the German-dominated vision of economic austerity as a way out of the euro crisis." That's certainly the case, and the vote was very much a repudiation of Sarkozy on a number of fronts (objections to his fiscal conservatism, to his pro-American and pro-German views, and to him personally) to his efforts to appeal to the far right), and what we'll likely see in Hollande at least early on is more of a counterweight to Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel (and the elite banking community that is driving the European fiscal policy that so many, and not just the Greeks, find so loathsome). France will also see some major policy changes: "Domestically, he has promised to raise taxes on big corporations and raise the tax rate to 75 percent for those earning more than one million euros a year."

But let's be clear. There's only so much Hollande can do, and only so much he'll be willing to do. He's no Sarkozy-Merkel conservative, of course, but he's still an advocate for fiscal restraint, campaigning on a pledge to balance the budget within five years. And ultimately the bankers still run Europe, just as they do the United States. Hollande will have to strike some sort of delicate balance between his base and the economic elite if he hopes to hold on to power. He did, after all, only win 51.67 percent of the national vote.

Whatever the case, it was clearly time for Sarkozy to go, and in voting for Hollande the French people, while divided, have joined the growing chorus of opposition to the right-wing fiscal and economic policies that have dominated Europe in recent years. It's not clear if Hollande can bring meaningful, lasting change even to his own country, let alone the EU, nor is it clear what such change would even mean (though more progressive taxation would be a good start), but one can at least be hopeful at the dawn of what we hope is a new era in French and hopefully European politics.