The mediatization of the Hollande presidency

Section 17: Elites and Political Leadership: Moving Ahead (Elite political communication) Paper title: The mediatization of the Hollande presidency This paper examines the mediatization of the top elite political leadership function in contemporary France – the presidency of the Republic – with specific reference to the current incumbent, François Hollande (2012–). The French president benefits from significant resources structurally embedded in the office and exercises power within a set of institutional constraints, both political and media. Any incumbent of the presidential office needs to mobilize the resources as effectively as possible so as to overcome the constraints. News media management and public communication form an integral part of the presidential ‘toolkit’ in this regard; they form part of any incumbent’s operationalization of the presidential function. The paper analyses, explains and evaluates the news media strategies and public communication activities undertaken by president Hollande during a presidential term that so far has been punctuated by certain high-profile events (including the Leonarda affair, the Valérie Trierweiller/Julie Gayet affair, the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015) and has been played out against the backcloth of very low economic growth and rising unemployment. The empirical core of the paper analyses and evaluates the mediatization of the Hollande presidency with reference to three analytic dimensions: news management; image projection; and the public/private leadership boundary. The paper’s central argument is that for roughly the first two years of his presidency, Hollande largely failed to integrate a coherent public communication and news media strategy into his conception of the functioning of the presidential office. After a relaunch of his presidency in the spring of 2014 (new prime minister, clearer affirmation of economic policy direction, more coherent parliamentary majority, appointment of new head of communications in the presidential office) a professionalization of presidential news management and image projection took place. The presidential response to two major terrorist incidents in Paris in 2015 symbolized this more professional approach to presidential communication. Yet despite the greater emphasis placed on public communication, the president’s popularity in opinion polls has not improved. The Hollande presidency exemplifies many of the problems facing executive leaders across established democracies in respect of their news media management and public communication activities (divided executive, source competition, critical media commentary, public disaffection). While the paper explicitly focuses on a case-study of French presidential leadership, therefore, its key themes have broader cross-national relevance. Raymond Kuhn