It started off like a French farce. Will it end up like a Greek tragedy? France’s “First Girlfriend”, Valérie Trierweiler, may well cause the political downfall of the man she fought so bitterly to catch – and still can’t get a marriage commitment from.
Five months after he was elected, François Hollande’s popularity figures are the lowest of any French president since Charles de Gaulle signed the 1962 treaty acknowledging the independence of Algeria after a bloody anti-colonialist war.
The general consensus is that Ms Trierweiler is one of the chief reasons why the Fifth Republic’s seventh president is seen as henpecked, inefficient and vacillating – in short, not in charge.
“The five women who make his life hell” was last week’s headline on news magazine L’Express. First on the list were the president’s partners, past and present: Ségolène Royal, the former presidential contender and mother of Hollande’s four children; and Valérie, the Paris-Match journalist who won Hollande from Royal.
The other three were former Socialist leader Martine Aubry, Green leader Cécile Duflot, and Angela Merkel: they would never have been qualified by gender if Hollande’s chaotic private life wasn’t the first subject of gossip and conjecture these days.
In this toxic environment came the revelations in La Frondeuse (“The Troublemaker”), a new biography published last Thursday by journalists Alix Bouilhaguet and Christophe Jakubyszyn, that while she was busy prying Hollande away from the home he’d been making with Royal for more than two decades, the (still-married) Trierweiler was three-timing – or should it be four-timing? – him with Patrick Devedjian, a former Sarkozyste cabinet minister. » | Anne-Elisabeth Moutet | Sunday, October 14, 2012
