Paris (AFP)
A "frog on water lilies", "the Little Thing": François Hollande curls the putative presidential candidates Emmanuel Macron and Eric Zemmour in a book to be published Wednesday, estimating that social democracy is "best placed" to "give back hope "to France.
In his work, entitled "Confronter" (Stock editions), the former president praises the merits of the mayor PS of Paris, "a woman all of composure, determination and tenacity", to which he advises to stay "proud of its socialist identity" to "be able to bring together a majority of French people".
To face the major challenges of France and "the great mutation" of society, "who is best placed to restore hope, in the face of disarray, resignation, lassitude, and abstention? liberalism, not sovereignty, not "leftism" or ecology. This is good old social democracy, "he told AFP.
However, he judges that he would need "a bath of youth" and that the candidate of this social democracy in 2022, Anne Hidalgo, should "have a global project" and "address everyone".
"I call for the rallying of voters around a driving force which must be the left of government," he said in an interview with Le Parisien Tuesday evening, reaffirming that he is not a presidential candidate.
"On the left, all the candidatures are Lilliputian. They are engaged in battles as microcholine as they are microscopic", he laments in this newspaper.
"This election will be marked by seriousness," which "will make the difference," Holland told AFP.
The former socialist president reviews in his book the various putative or declared presidential candidates and is ironic about some of them: he sees Emmanuel Macron as "a man of no doctrine, a traveler without a compass", " changing opinions according to events, jumping from one conviction to another like a frog on water lilies ".
As for the far-right polemicist Eric Zemmour, he describes him as a "Little thing", which nourished "a growing bitterness" of not being sufficiently recognized.
"But it is not Trump who wants, even in miniature," adds Mr. Hollande.
Less critical of Edouard Philippe, he notes however that the latter today camouflages "his real intentions in a sort of rhetorical fog, like those octopuses who hide behind a cloud of ink".
On the left, he considers Jean-Luc Mélenchon as "a ball for the left", and describes his former minister Arnaud Montebourg as "a Zorro of politics" "emerging out of the night to deliver France from the clutches of Brussels. if one day he sat on the European Council, he would pass for a zozo ".
Basically, François Hollande makes a series of proposals: he defends a presidential regime which suppresses the Prime Minister, a "planning" to "fix for a long time the path of growth of the country".
He also advocates a post-Covid "French New Deal", intended to "strengthen our industrial capacities, adapt our organization to the ecological emergency, and prepare the population, young and old alike, for the jobs of tomorrow".
Faced with "the essential carbon pricing", which risks creating "injustice", he suggests, like others on the left, "compensation through the distribution of targeted checks", and to considerably raise "premiums" for the purchase of an electric car or a heater with low CO2 emissions ".
He also considers "possible" to bring the gross minimum wage to 1,900 euros at the end of the next five-year term, ie a little more than 3% per year ".
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