François Hollande: Presidency through ambiguity IT ALL started with the word "normal." François Hollande chose the term to define the sort of president he promised to be. To the French ear, it means more than ordinary: it suggests something that conforms to the rule, the way things should be. After the look-at-me term of Mr Hollande's predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose self-promotion matched his dizzying hyperactivity, the word "normal" met a yearning for more modest government and simpler times. If only, the word seemed to say, things could go back to the way they were. A year after his election, Mr Hollande finds himself cast as a normal president for what is turning out to be a most abnormal time. The economy has slid back into recession. The government has been forced to postpone its promise to cut the budget deficit to 3% of GDP. Firms are struggling to stay competitive. Unemployment is rising. And, with a 24% poll rating, Mr Hollande's popularity has sunk to a record low for the Fifth Republic. A miserable 5% of the French think things will improve. The normal president faces two uncommonly testing tasks: to fix France's competitiveness problem, including its over-heavy public spending, and to explain why this requires policies that collide almost head-on with what, as Socialist candidate, he said a year ago he would do. Those who have recently spent time with Mr Hollande say he understands how pressing matters are, and how far France has slipped behind Germany. He knows that his fiscal policies have been "anti-business." He judges French public spending, at 57% of GDP - the biggest share in the euro zone - to be "too high." After more than a decade of putting off hard choices, France is beginning to wake up to them. How can it compete as economic power shifts to emerging markets? What sort of protection can it afford its citizens against ill-health, joblessness and old age? Indeed, a new tone marked Mr Hollande's press conference at the Elysée on May 16th, when he promised to "go on the offensive" to revive growth and unveiled new ideas for the euro zone. The French, Mr Hollande said, would have to "work longer" before getting pensions. Family benefits would be trimmed for the rich. He could not keep raising taxes to squeeze the deficit, so spending cuts loom. "We're not going to spend and then leave," he said. We're going to make savings and stay. To the casual visitor, this might seem banal. For the French left, it is baffling and reinforces a sense of uncertainty and malaise. On the campaign trail, Mr Hollande's only specific pension promise was to reduce from 62 to 60 the retirement age for those who started work young. In a showpiece speech to launch his campaign, he never mentioned competitiveness. Candidate Hollande was eloquent about taxing big firms and the rich (whom he called "grasping and arrogant") but not about spending cuts; clearer on stopping factory closures than on letting firms restructure. Unsurprisingly, Mr Hollande's new talk is prompting mockery and dismay. Workers at a closed blast furnace in Lorraine, which Mr Hollande promised to save, erected a stone plaque marked "Treason," which reads "Here lie Mr Hollande's promises of change." Some of his most trenchant critics are on the left, including the Green Party, which sits in government, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Socialist minister now on the Communist-backed left. A cartoon in Le Monde showed unions aghast as a miniature Mr Sarkozy emerges from Mr Hollande's head, shouting "You'll have to work more...to earn less!" Only 19% of those who voted for Mr Hollande are satisfied with his first year. The French left has long been split between those, such as Pierre Moscovici, the finance minister, who see themselves as Social Democrats in tune with Germany or Scandinavia, and a wing embodied by Arnaud Montebourg, the industry minister, that still draws on anti-capitalism, the Socialist Party's founding doctrine. A protégé of Jacques Delors, Mr Hollande is commonly linked to the pro-European moderates. But, even in office, he refuses to say so. When asked at his press conference if he would acknowledge that he was a Social Democrat, Mr Hollande paused and then replied: "I am a Socialist." "The tragedy of the Socialist Party is that it keeps putting off its rupture with the revolutionary left," argues Arnaud Leparmentier, a journalist at Le Monde. This leaves Mr Hollande ruling in deliberate ambiguity. He will not make the case for a more Scandinavian left, for fear of provoking a backlash. So he pursues reforms with one hand, while throwing red meat to the left - persisting with the 75% top tax rate, keeping Mr Montebourg in government - with the other. In practical terms, this means all reform is constrained. A new labour-market law, for instance, gives flexibility over hours and pay to employers of lower-paid workers, but also raises costs through a compulsory health contribution. Mr Hollande's aides call this reform through dialogue and consensus. Jacques Attali, a Socialist grandee, says the result so far is "extraordinarily limited." Pinning down the elusive Mr Hollande is likely to be futile. More than just an enigma, he is "see-through," argues Jean-Marie Rouart, a writer, in Paris-Match, prompting "more indifference than real animosity." Those hoping for clarity over economic policy or a Churchillian appeal for a national effort to get France moving are likely to be disappointed. He wants his tone to be "neither Churchill nor Roosevelt, but Hollande," says somebody close to him. A technocrat, Mr Hollande wears ambiguity with surprising ease. The president lacks the words needed to create the political space that might enable him to define a new French Social Democratic left. Such a task would require forcefulness, imagination - anything but normality.