Once so deeply unpopular he had to give up running for a second term in office, former French president François Hollande has slipped back into the conversation ahead of next year’s Élysée Palace race, hoping voters put off by squabbling candidates will come to see him as a safe – if unexciting – pair of hands after a decade of Emmanuel Macron’s ‘disruptive’ presidency.
After a sweltering summer that torched France’s forests and bled its rivers dry, could former “Rain Man” president François Hollande be the answer to the country’s woes?
