Francois Hollande is an affable and self-deprecating politician seen as a managerial consensus-builder, and a virtual unknown outside France — and he could be its next president.The 57-year-old won the Socialist Party's presidential nomination on Sunday, defeating party leader Martine Aubry and setting up a likely clash with conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy in next spring's election. From the moderate wing of France's Socialist Party, the low-key Hollande is not obvious presidential material, yet opinion polls show him far more popular than the incumbent. Hollande is a lawmaker in the National Assembly and the governor of the central Correze region — the same political backyard as conservative former President Jacques Chirac — and led the Socialist party from 1997 to 2008.Critics say his resume is otherwise thin: He has never run a government ministry, has limited international recognition, and made his name as leader of a party that was weakened and badly fractured during his tenure. Hollande's former partner Segolene Royal — the mother of his four children — was the Socialists' last presidential nominee. Their relationship unraveled during the 2007 campaign, and they later separated. She ran again this year, but lost badly in last Sunday's first phase of the Socialist primary.Hollande wants more progressive tax rates. He sparked a political furor in the run-up to the 2007 election by advocating a tax hike for those French who earned more than €4,000 ($5,500) a month. “He must not like himself,” Sarkozy quipped in a TV debate. Hollande's program calls for more spending to reverse cuts in education by Sarkozy's government, a new work contract to encourage companies to hire young people, and focus on reducing France's high state budget deficit. It says little about international affairs, other than calling for an unspecified “pact” with Germany, the EU's economic engine, to spur on the now-troubled European project. Hollande's strategy, in part, is to cast himself as the anti-Sarkozy. The macho president made his name as a hard-as-nails interior minister who led a crackdown on crime for much of the 2000s. Sarkozy and Hollande have squared off electorally before: Each led their party's list for the 1999 European parliament elections.
