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SUNDAY NOTEBOOKS. The ex-president considers the rise in taxes inevitable. Macron would be well advised not to listen to him.
By Herve Gattegno
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EYou’re back François Hollande! It’s not that we were impatient to see him again, but a little media backlash was predictable: the former president reappears each time the news seems to him to be conducive to promoting himself at the expense of his successor. “He will inevitably hit on the pension reform”, one of his former ministers announced to me recently, not breaking with him but who says he has “taken the field”. Logic: to criticize a reform that a majority of French people reject is to make sure to be in the direction of the wind.
Remember: Hollande had done the same at the time of the Yellow Vests – “I am listening to you”, he launched to the demonstrators, in a fit of astonishing demagoguery (he had later admitted “a share of responsibility” in crisis). More recently, he…