On
16 October 2011, Hollande was nominated to be the Socialist and Left Radical
Party candidate in the 2012 presidential election. His main opponent is
President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Early Life and Background
Hollande
was born in Rouen, Seine-Maritime, Upper Normandy to a middle-class family. His
mother, Nicole Frédérique Marguerite Tribert, was a social worker (1927-2009),
and his father, Georges Gustave Hollande, an ear, nose, and throat doctor, who
"had once run for the extreme right in local politics". The surname
"Hollande" is "believed to come from Calvinist ancestors who
escaped the Netherlands in the 16th century and took the name of their old
country."
Education
He
attended Saint Jean-Baptiste de La Salle boarding school, then HEC Paris, École
nationale d'administration, and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. He
graduated from ENA in 1980. He lived in the United States in the summer of 1974
while he was a university student. Immediately after graduating, he was
employed to work as a councillor in the Court of Audit.
Political career
After
volunteering to work for François Mitterrand's ultimately unsuccessful campaign
in the 1974 presidential election when he was a student, Hollande joined the
Socialist Party five years later. He was quickly spotted by Jacques Attali, a
senior adviser to Mitterrand, who arranged for Hollande to stand for election
to the French National Assembly in 1981 in Corrèze against future President
Jacques Chirac, who was then the Leader of the Rally for the Republic, a Neo-Gaullist
party. Hollande lost to Chirac in the first round, although he would go on to
become a Special Adviser to the newly-elected President Mitterrand, before
serving as a staffer for Max Gallo, the government's spokesman. After becoming
a Municipal Councillor for Ussel in 1983, he contested Corrèze for a second
time in 1988, this time being elected to the National Assembly. Hollande lost
his bid for re-election to the National Assembly in the so-called "blue
wave" of the 1993 election, described as such due to the amount of seats
gained by the Right at the expense of the Socialist Party.
Personal Life
For
over thirty years, his partner was fellow Socialist politician Ségolène Royal,
with whom he has four children – Thomas (1984), Clémence (1985), Julien (1987)
and Flora (1992). In June 2007, just a month after Royal's defeat in the French
presidential election of 2007, the couple announced that they were separating.
A
few months after his split from Ségolène Royal was announced, a French website
published details of a relationship between Hollande and French journalist
Valérie Trierweiler. This was controversial as some considered this to be a
breach of France's strict stance on politicians' personal privacy. In November
2007, Valérie Trierweiler confirmed and openly discussed her relationship with
Hollande in an interview with French weekly Télé 7 Jours.
From : www.wikipedia.org
