Will he be a presidential candidate? “If I’m getting started, it’s at the right time,” insisted François Hollande on Thursday, visiting the Châlons-en-Champagne fair, the day of the release of his new book with programmatic accents. “I am a former president, I know what a presidential campaign is, it is long” and the main issue must be brought “as close as possible to the election”, estimated the former PS president, in power from 2012 to 2017.
“It will be at the end of December that I will make my decision known,” he repeated. However, he admitted to already being in the campaign, while his new book Unite. New world, new left (ed. Robert Laffont), full of proposals aimed at seducing even the center-right, strongly resembles a program.
“I’m going to watch the primary”
“If putting forward ideas is being in the countryside, yes,” he replied straight away during a brief press briefing with journalists on the occasion of his stroll through this major agricultural fair in the Marne. Many of the candidates already declared for the 2027 presidential election have already paraded there in recent days.
François Hollande refuses to participate in the left-wing primary, intending to file an appeal if the winner of this tie-breaking process collapses. “I will look at the primary for what it will give, that is to say debates”, but “I do not think that it is the right calendar, I do not think that it is necessarily the right procedure”, he recalled Thursday. “I am not going to support (a candidate in the primary, Editor’s note) because it is not my place to support. But I am going to do what every citizen must do: vote,” he added.
