The president’s thankless burden

“FRANCE is only really herself if she is in the lead,” wrote the founder of the modern republic, Charles de Gaulle. For the current French president, François Hollande, leadership abroad has involved a steep learning curve: before taking office in 2012, he ran the provincial council of rural Corrèze. Yet in power Mr Hollande has shown a rather steadier hand in conducting foreign affairs than he has displayed running his own country.

His activity abroad reaches wide. This week he was busy in Paris gathering support for a climate conference, to be hosted by France in December, which he hopes will lead to a binding accord on carbon emissions. His foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, held a particularly firm line during six-country talks with Iran, which resulted in a nuclear deal on July 14th. It was a French idea, for instance, to create a “snapback” mechanism allowing sanctions to be reimposed automatically if Iran breaks its word. Now the French are capitalising on the deal. Mr Fabius will fly to Tehran to meet President Hassan Rohani on July 29th—although, to the dismay of eager French business types hoping for a seat on the plane, this is to be a political trip only.

There has been no such bashfulness in France’s dealings in the Gulf. Where America has lost favour because Barack Obama was talking to Iran, France has quietly stepped in. Mr Hollande has jetted off four times to Saudi Arabia since his election, most recently in May when he was the first foreign guest for many years at a Gulf leaders’ summit. The French are beginning to see a commercial pay-off. Before seeing the Saudis, Mr Hollande sold Qatar a squadron of Rafale jets, built by France’s Dassault, worth €6.3 billion ($7 billion). It was the third Rafale export deal on his watch. Hopes of commerce also underpinned his trips to Cuba in May and Angola in July.

Even the Greek economy’s near-death experience could be seen as a victory for Mr Hollande. While Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, favoured a Greek exit from the euro zone, Mr Hollande had only one aim: to keep Greece in the currency area. As a co-creator of that currency, France had a founder’s interest in its health, as well as worries about its own vulnerability to unstable bond markets should the zone break up. Mr Hollande sent French finance-ministry officials to help Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, draft reform proposals, and acted as a go-between in talks with a sceptical Germany. “France, in these negotiations, ensured that it was Europe that emerged victorious,” Mr Hollande gloated afterwards.

Mr Hollande may be a lesser player than Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, in dealings with Russia over Ukraine. But his belated suspension of war-ship sales to Russia was an important signal.

And France, with Britain, remains one of Europe’s only two weighty military powers, each spending roughly 2% of GDP on defence, the target set by NATO. Indeed France recently aborted a planned four-year freeze of military spending, adding €3.8 billion in real terms to its defence budget from 2016, to reinforce its counter-terrorism capability. And France uses its firepower. Mr Hollande has sent soldiers to repel jihadists in Mali, and to stop genocide in the Central African Republic. Before America pulled back, France had fighter jets ready to bomb Syria in 2013. As one foreign observer puts it, the French now have a rare mix of armed muscle and readiness for action. France held off from the 2003 assault on Iraq, so the public has not turned against such ventures. It has soldiers in Africa and the Gulf, and the president has the constitutional power to deploy them.

The mystery is how poorly Mr Hollande manages to project himself as a force in diplomacy. The big French role in the Iran talks largely got lost from view, at least outside France. And Mr Hollande’s attempt to flag it up, during an interview on Bastille Day, came across as fanciful. Military matters aside, Mrs Merkel is the public face of Europe in Washington, DC, and the main external actor in Greece’s drama.

Part of the explanation is temperament. Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr Hollande’s predecessor, used look-at-me hyperactivity to disguise France’s weakening role within the Franco-German axis. By contrast, Mr Hollande’s consensus-seeking instincts and unassuming presence seldom command attention. His grand proposals for further integrating the euro zone, announced on July 19th, went largely unnoticed.

Perhaps most importantly, Mr Hollande’s activity abroad is overshadowed by a poor economic record at home. After near-zero growth for the past three years, French GDP is expected to increase by just 1.1% this year. This raises longer-term questions about how far France can sustain its robust internationalism. More immediately, it explains why Mr Hollande has failed to translate foreign feats into poll numbers.

Elected to tax the rich and create jobs, Mr Hollande quickly discarded his 75% top income-tax rate; and unemployment remains stuck at over 10%. The austerity he vowed to end in Europe is now being applied, with his consent, to Greece. “He has not only lost authority but there is a sort of indifference towards him,” says Laurent Bouvet of the University of Versailles. Mr Schäuble’s tough line is approved by 70% of his compatriots. By contrast, Mr Hollande languishes at 19%, worse than any other modern French president three years into a first term. Even de Gaulle, who was finally disowned by the French, never saw his second-term rating dip below 52%. He was revered by some citizens, hated by others; many seem unmoved by Mr Hollande, whatever his global mission.