Updated: Jan. 30, 2012

The lineup of main contenders for France’s 2012 presidential elections was set in October 2011, when the Socialist party chose François Hollande to face the conservative incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy.

At the time of Mr. Hollande’s victory in a primary, opinion polls showed him and his main rival, Martine Aubry, both with strong leads over Mr. Sarkozy. But there was not much excitement about the prospect of a Socialist victory, especially with the putative favorite, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, out of the race as a consequence of his encounter with a housekeeper in a New York hotel room.

In its early stages, it appeared to be a grumpy French presidential campaign, with only a few voters passionate about their choices. It could be called the election of “désamour,” one of those nearly untranslatable words, meaning a falling out of love, a disenchantment mixed with disillusion.

But even as Mr. Sarkozy’s unpopularity with voters continued to plumb new depths, the outcome of the contest remained far from clear, with rivals to his left and right hoping to exploit a deepening public disquiet over the ongoing euro crisis.

On Jan. 22, 2012, François Hollande formally opened his campaign with a passionate speech calling for change, equality and justice. Mr. Hollande, who calls himself “a normal man,” is ahead in the polls with months to go before the first round of voting on April 22. But his lead over Mr. Sarkozy has been slipping as Mr. Hollande has been criticized for being bland and vague.

In an effort to add substance to his platform, on Jan. 26, Mr. Hollande issued a package of 60 measures that would increase taxes and government spending but aim to balance the budget by 2017.

Mr. Hollande promised to reverse the legacy of Mr. Sarkozy by raising taxes for corporations, banks and the relatively wealthy, creating 60,000 teaching jobs and bringing the retirement age back down to 60, from 62. He also promised to create 150,000 subsidized jobs in areas of high unemployment, putting his emphasis on better opportunities for the young, and said he wanted to promote more industry in France by creating a kind of public investment bank.

Marine Le Pen, the candidate of the National Front on the far right, has been running third in many polls, while a centrist candidate, François Bayrou of the Democratic Movement, has been gaining ground, taking support from Mr. Hollande.

Read More...

An Early Withdrawal From Afghanistan

Throughout his presidency, Mr. Sarkozy has been an active supporter of robust military action. French forces have been fighting alongside the United States in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

But the Taliban is not the only concern for coalition forces. According to a classified report from mid-January 2012, American and other coalition forces were being killed in increasing numbers by the very Afghan soldiers they fought alongside and trained, in attacks motivated by deep-seated animosity between the supposedly allied forces.

Underscoring the danger, on Jan. 20 four French service members were killed and 15 were wounded when a gunman wearing an Afghan National Army uniform turned his weapon on them in Kapisa Province in eastern Afghanistan, according to an Afghan police official. The shootings happened in Tagab District, an area that is viewed as dangerous and dominated by insurgent forces.

The attacks prompted Mr. Sarkozy to suspend French military operations in Afghanistan.

On Jan. 27, Mr. Sarkozy announced that France would break with its allies in NATO and accelerate the French withdrawal from Afghanistan, pulling back combat troops a year early, by the end of 2013. Mr. Sarkozy also said that he and Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, would ask the NATO alliance for a similar speedup of the transfer of primary security responsibilities to Afghan troops.

A senior NATO official said the French decisions were bound to create problems for the alliance because they would give encouragement to the forces fighting the Afghan government, supporting the idea that attacks on NATO and coalition troops would push governments to leave Afghanistan sooner than planned.

But the accelerated French withdrawal has more symbolic than strategic weight. France has the fifth-largest contingent in Afghanistan, with an official count of 3,900 troops. Its forces have been in a largely defensive posture for the past year or longer, focused on preventing any further loss of troops’ lives, according to a NATO official. Since 2001, 82 French troops have been killed in Afghanistan.

Potentially more worrisome is the proposal for NATO to accelerate the transfer to Afghan control by a year, to the end of 2013 rather than 2014. So far only half of the country’s population is in areas handed over to the Afghans. The most troubled areas remain under international forces. In many cases in the less troubled areas, Afghan control is only nominal and coalition forces remain as support.

Credit Rating is Downgraded

The new year delivered evidence of that new world. On Jan. 13, 2012, Standard & Poor’s stripped France of its sterling credit rating, downgrading it one notch from AAA to AA+.

The ratings agency also cut Portugal’s credit to junk status and downgraded Italy’s debt by two steps in a wide-ranging revision of European countries caught in the euro crisis.

The actions would be the strongest signal yet that Europe’s sovereign debt woes were far from over and would pose fresh political challenges for politicians, including Mr. Sarkozy, as they try to stabilize the problem on the Continent, now in its third year.

A downgrade by a single ratings agency would have an immediate, though not devastating, impact on the countries’ ability to borrow money.

The downgrade came at the end of a week in which Mr. Sarkozy and Prime Minister Mario Monti of Italy warned that the crisis could deepen if steps were not taken to stoke growth. Both delivered their messages to Chancellor Angela Merkel in her offices in Berlin, prompting the German leader to admit for the first time that the harsh program of austerity she has been pushing on the euro zone was not a cure-all for the crisis.

Economic Crisis Changes the Political Atmosphere

The worsening economic crisis has changed the political atmosphere. As Mr. Sarkozy contemplates his race for re-election, he is confronted with an economy reeling from the euro crisis and nearly zero growth. In mid-January 2012, the unemployment rate was 9.9 percent, a 12-year high, and rising.

The loss of the treasured AAA rating was a major political blow to Mr. Sarkozy. Polls show the main concerns of voters are clear: the size of the French debt, the cost of living, unemployment and general economic insecurity.

It is hard to see how France can quickly extricate itself from its economic morass. It is Europe’s most centralized, state-dominated economy, and it is deeply invested in its opposition to what the French call the Anglo-Saxon economies of Britain and the United States, whose laissez-faire approach they blame for the 2008 financial crisis.

For Mr. Sarkozy and other European leaders, the euro crisis and the heavy sovereign debts that led to it have created a kind of political prison. Normally, faced with high unemployment and stagnant growth, leaders would spend to stimulate the economy, investing in infrastructure, education and job training. Instead, pressed by the markets and his own promises to limit deficits, Mr. Sarkozy has had to cut government spending and raise taxes in an election year.

Energizing the Left and the Far Right

In mid-January 2012, François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, led in the polls. He said that Mr. Sarkozy’s presidency, with higher debt and higher unemployment, has been a disaster, though he has provided few details about his own plans.

The economic crisis has also mobilized France’s isolationist far right, with Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front, running not far behind Mr. Sarkozy in the polls.

The Socialists enter the race a little desperate. While they have done progressively well in local elections, they have not elected a president since François Mitterrand, who left office more than 15 years ago. Even worse, in 2002, a Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, lost in the first round to Jean-Marie Le Pen, then the leader of the far right National Front, handing the election to Jacques Chirac.

Mr. Sarkozy has yet to officially announce his re-election bid, concentrating on dealing with the euro crisis, which has resulted in a downgrade of the country’s bond rating.

The main surprise of the first round was the strong showing of Arnaud Montebourg, an articulate advocate of protectionism and “de-globalization,” calling for the imposition of social and environmental taxes on imports to protect French jobs. His advocacy of a return to an imaginary France — in fact, French exports have been falling as a percentage of global exports nearly every year for the last 40 years — annoyed political experts, but it won the support of 17 percent of those who voted.

Mr. Hollande presents himself as the “anti-Sarkozy,” an easygoing and witty “Mr. Normal” who eschews chauffer-driven limousines in favor of his own motorscooter. It is a deliberate contrast to the frenetic Mr. Sarkozy, prone to extravagance in his personal tastes and who has embroiled the French more in his private life than many people find comfortable.

The son of a doctor and a social worker, Mr. Hollande was educated at France’s most elite law and business schools. Yet his rivals consistently point to his inexperience in government. He was the Socialist Party’s leader for a decade until 2008, but he has never been a government minister or run a business. He is a member of Parliament and the president of the regional department of Corrèze, a rural area best known for its connections to former President Jacques Chirac.

Mr. Hollande inherited a region steeped in debts, many of them from Chirac-initiated infrastructure projects, and is considered to have managed the budget well. But Corrèze is one of the smallest departments in France and does not really compare with governing a nation that sits on the United Nations Security Council and possesses nuclear weapons.

Foreign affairs barely entered the Socialist Party’s primary and its televised debates, and Mr. Hollande is considered something of a work in progress and is virtually unknown outside France. But foreign policy, which Mr. Sarkozy considers one of his strengths, is a prime prerogative of the French president.

Ms. Le Pen’s National Front, meanwhile, has drawn much of its strength from a general, and growing, distrust of mainstream politicians. (A TNS Sofres poll published in late September found that 72 percent of the French believe their politicians are corrupt.) It also feeds off of fears among France’s urban working class — exacerbated by the current economic crisis — of being displaced by a steady influx of immigrants, largely Muslim, and lower-wage workers in countries like China and India, as well as some of the newer, eastern member states of the European Union.

Ms. Le Pen has sought to burnish the image of the National Front, playing down the anti-Semitism that was a hallmark of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and barring “skinheads” and those sporting military fatigues or combat boots — the stereotypical uniform of the far-right youth — from party rallies.

Yet she has continued to attack French Muslims for their supposed unwillingness to assimilate into French society and accept French values, including secularism. She has also challenged the right of the E.U. to dictate policy to member states, vowed — if elected — to leave the euro zone and restore the French franc, and even to pull out of the U.S.-led NATO military alliance.

Analysts cautioned that it would likely be some time before Mr. Sarkozy, a bare-knuckled campaigner, formally announces his candidacy — making it still hard to predict whether the president would be more vulnerable to the challenge from the Socialists or the National Front.

Hide