Hollande ruins French credibility

This week President Francois Hollande gave a much-anticipated press conference in Paris in front of 500 mainly French journalists. His presser – akin to the annual American State of the Union address – was billed as setting out a grand plan to salvage the moribund French economy.

But while he rambled on for nearly an hour about tax breaks and unemployment, everyone wanted Hollande to just cut to the chase and fess up to his secret love affair.

Last week, a French gossip magazine splashed pictures of Hollande making nocturnal visits to a well-known actress, 18 years his junior, at an apartment near the presidential Elysée Palace. The secret affair has been going on for at least six months, but the gossip magazine broke the news to the wider public.

The drama took a new twist this week when Hollande’s official partner, Valerie Trierweiler, had to be admitted to hospital for several days suffering from nervous exhaustion over the disclosed affair. 

Doctors said she wasn’t “suicidal” but was recovering from depression.

So far, this is all tittle-tattle. But there is a serious issue of credibility and accountability for the French head of state.

At the Elysée Palace press conference this week, Hollande insulated himself with conceit and refused to answer the few timid questions that the French media put to him about his extracurricular love life.

“I stand by this one principle,” said the French president. “Privacy.” In other words, Hollande was making a virtue out of a vice and pretty much telling the public to mind its own business.

He was, in effect, declaring that he had no one to answer to, and he fobbed off the assembled media with a vague mention that he would sometime over the next month clarify who is actually the French “first lady” – his long-time girlfriend, Valerie Trierweiler, or his latest flame, the actress Julie Gayet.

But this obdurate secrecy and unaccountability, which Hollande calls “privacy”, is at the crux of French government credibility. If Hollande won’t come clean on the circumstances of his personal affairs, why should anyone believe him or his government on other more important matters?

It is not that Hollande should flagellate himself publicly with repentance or that he is obliged to reveal lurid private details. We are not talking about intimate domestic matters. That’s not the point.

The point is that Hollande dismissed any question into circumstances of his public conduct that bears importantly on the public interest.

In conducting his secret liaison, Hollande was driving around Paris late at night on a scooter on his way to meet his lover. Clad in a black helmet, he appeared like a buffoonish character out of an Inspector Clouseau movie.

Granted, he was accompanied by another male motorbike rider – presumably a bodyguard. But is such a reckless security arrangement for the French head of state really acceptable?

This is the man who has access to the secret codes for France’s nuclear arsenal. What if he were kidnapped by terrorists or foreign agents?

What if foreign intelligence were to have snapped images of Hollande’s trysts? That makes the French leader – a member of the United Nations Security Council – vulnerable to political bribery.

When Hollande tried to wreck the P5+1 nuclear negotiations with Iran at the end of last year how do we know, in retrospect now, that he was not being pressured by the Israelis?

Or when Hollande earlier this month came up with the unprecedented $3 billion French arms deal to Lebanon paid for by Saudi Arabia. That deal has serious implications for Lebanon’s internal politics with potentially grave sectarian fallout from this French-Saudi intervention.

One has to ask the question: was the French president acting out of being compromised by the Saudis, or again the Israelis, or even the Americans.

French politicians may arrogantly assert that their personal life is off-limits to public scrutiny. That’s not an ethical argument.

It’s a conceited notion that they are above reproach. Sure, the public does not have a right to pry, but they have a right to know if their leaders are credible or trustworthy. Invoking privacy in the truculent way that the French political establishment does is corrosive to credibility.

Where do you draw the line? If a French politician is taking backhanders from big business is that privacy? Or if he is snorting mind-altering drugs, is that just personal recreation that’s none of the public’s business?

Hollande’s public rating was rock bottom even before his nocturnal habits came to light.

Although the French public doesn’t seem to care much about his secret affair, nevertheless there is a serious question of credibility and public accountability at stake.

From here on, how do we believe anything that Hollande professes?

On the French economy, is he really trying to bolster the national interest, or is he just pandering to big business and the financial oligarchs with tax breaks and swingeing public spending cuts?

On Syria, is he sincere about supporting a peace conference at Geneva II due to open next week, or is France just aiming to railroad illegal regime change by stealth?

On the Iranian P5+1 negotiations – an issue critical to the wellbeing of Iran’s people – how can we believe French claims that they are acting out of concern to prevent weapons proliferation, or are the French bidding for some other sinister reason?

In the Central African Republic, are French troops currently invading that country to save lives, as Hollande claims, or is France illegally securing imperialist interests under the cynical guise of “humanitarian protection”?

Hollande’s conceit, like the rest of the French political establishment, is at the heart of France’s imploding credibility.