The Socialist Party’s runaway favorite to become president at election next year had been former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn but his IMF career and presidential hopes foundered when he was arrested in New York last May on charges of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. The charges have since been dropped but.

 

And it is Francois Hollande, a little known politician outside France, who became Sunday the Socialist candidate who will have the task to challenge  Sarkozy – who has till to declare his candidacy - and extreme-right Marine Le Pen in the presidential poll in May 2011.

In a US-style primary election 57-year-old Hollande, considered by media as “moderate and realist,” scored a victory over his rival Martine Aubry, seen as more leftist, with more than 56 percent of the vote.

 

Socialists have not been at the Elysee Palace since Francois Mitterrand seventeen years ago.

 

"I measure the scale of the task awaiting me. It is vast. It is grave. I must rise to meet the aspirations of a French people who are sick and tired of the policies of Nicolas Sarkozy," Hollande told supporters on Sunday night.

 

But for the 600,000 French Jews, beside French interior politics, the candidates position  towards the Jews and Israel is of utmost importance. 

Hollande is generally regarded as pro-Israel despite the fact that the Socialist Party has been often criticized for its pro-Palestinian positions. Aubry, to the contrary, made several controversial pro-Palestinian statements that were received with concern by the French Jews. 

 

The CRIF, the umbrella representative group of French Jewish organizations, congratulated Hollande for his election and praised his previous commitments towards Judaism and his empathy for Israel. 

 

“We hope that he will express these positions during the election campaign,” Richard Prasquier, president of CRIF, told me. 

 

“He knows Israel and is among those in the Socialist Party who has an old sympathy towards Israel,” he added. 

 

Moreover, his team is made up of people who seem to be rather reassuring , like Pierre Moscovici, a former European Affairs Minister, who is Jewish, MEP Vincent Peillon or Manual Valls, one of the 6 candidates in the primary who threw his support for Hollande.  

 

The election of Hollande comes as Jews are expressing growing concern about the apparent evolution of Sarkozy’s position on Israel to a return to France’s “traditional” pro-Arab policy.

 

While several European leaders have rejected Mahmoud Abbas’s unilateral request to the UN to recognize a Palestinian state, Sarkozy, in his address to the UN General Assembly,  advocated to grant the Palestinians an upgraded ‘observer state’ status.

 

And more recently, he was quoted in French satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaine as saying that “it is silly to talk about a Jewish state”, in a reference to Israel’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state in any peace agreement. He added, "it would be like saying that this table is Catholic. There are two million Arabs in Israel." 

 

Sarkozy, who has always described himself as a true friend of Israel, was also quoted as calling Mahmoud Abbas “a statesman” while “Netanyahu, on the other hand, never fails to disappoint us.”

 

Even though the Elysee Presidential palace did not issue a response the report, the statements have apparently open a confidence crisis among French Jews. 

He is likely to clarify his position in an interview with French Jewish radio Radio J on Wednesday mainly dedicated to Gilad Shalit’s release.

 

Observers recalled that former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a conservative president of France from 1974 to 1981, was not reelected. He ascribed his defeat — by less than 1 % of the vote against François Mitterrand, the Socialist challenger — to the Jewish community, which resented his pro-Arab policies.

 

From then on and as long as he entertained the hope to run again, he made sure to appear as a friend of Israel.

 

Are Jews going to have the same reaction with Nicolas Sarkozy next year? 

 

Yossi Lempkowicz