“Let me tell you who my rival is. It does not bear a name or have a face, it’s the finance industry,” Hollande told a crowd of more than 10,000 supporters during his first campaign rally yesterday. “In the past 20 years, the financial industry has taken control of our societies, of our lives and threatens our states,” he said in the northern suburbs of Paris.
Exactly 90 days before the first round of voting, 57-year- old Hollande presented for the first time proposals including a tax on financial transactions and splitting retail and investment banks. The lawmaker and former Socialist Party chief said new rules to control the financial sector would be implemented in the first weeks of his administration.
“His stance against the financial sector is intense, but realistic because he’s adopted measures that already have been proposed or existed, like the U.S. Glass-Steagall Act,” said Nicolas Tenzer, the director of CERAP, a political think-tank in Paris. “This was a nod to the left-wing of his party and also an electorate that doesn’t want to bow to the financial elite.”
An opinion poll released Jan. 21 showed Hollande with a 14- point a lead over Sarkozy. The president, who has yet to declare his intention to run, would lose by 57 percent to 43 percent against the Socialist challenger if the two faced-off in the second round of the elections on May 6, according to the BVA poll. The poll of 974 people was carried out from Jan. 18 to 19 and didn’t provide a margin of error.
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