February 4, 2013

French President François Hollande paid a triumphant visit on February 2 to the fabled city of Timbuktu, where he received a rapturous welcome from crowds chanting “Vive la France!” and waving banners stating “Papa François, the mysterious city welcomes you.” French and Malian forces drove Islamist jihadists out of the city on January 27 and into the vast desert to the north. (Mali was once a French colony.) However, residents of Timbuktu worry that the rebels will return as soon as the French withdraw their troops. “These Islamists, they have not been defeated,” Moustapha Ben Essayouti, a member of a locally prominent family, told French correspondents. “Hardly any of them have been killed. . . . If France leaves, they will come back.” While praising French and Malian troops for the “exceptional mission,” President Hollande acknowledged that “the fight is not over.” In a later speech in Mali’s capital, Bamako, he declared, “We will be with you to the end, all the way to northern Mali.”

President Hollande’s government announced on January 12 that it was sending troops into Mali to help wrest the nation back from Islamic jihadist expansion. Some 1,900 African troops–including soldiers from Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, Nigeria,  Senegal, and Togo–were deployed to Mali as part of a United Nations-backed African intervention force to drive the insurgents northward.

Franch and Malian troops have driven Islamist rebels out of Timbuktu and into the desert to the north. (World Book map; map data © MapQuest.com, Inc.)

Islamist rebels gained control of much of the north in 2012 after a military coup in Mali’s capital, Bamako, created a power vacuum. At the core of the Islamist insurgency are the remnants of a now-defunct Algerian rebel group that was largely driven out of Algeria and into the unpoliced desert land in northern Mali sometime after the Algerian civil war was settled in 1999. A loose alliance of Algerian and Mauritanian  fighters, they are believed to be connected to an al-Qa’ida offshoot known as “al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb.” (Maghreb refers to northern Africa west of Egypt). The group aims to overthrow the Algerian government and institute an Islamic state under Shar’iah law. The group operates in Algeria, Mauritania, Niger, and other ungoverned areas of the Sahel region.

Additional World Book articles:

• Algeria 1991 (a Back in Time article)
• Algeria 1992 (a Back in Time article)
• Algeria 1999 (a Back in Time article)

April 23, 2012

Socialist Francois Hollande received the most votes in France’s presidential election on April 22, forcing a second-round run-off on May 6. Hollande took 28.5 percent of the vote, compared with President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 27.1 percent. Far-right candidate Marine Le Pen won 18.2 percent of the vote, with the rest divided among seven other candidates. French political experts described Le Pen’s vote as “a stunning result for the far right.” (They regard her National Front party as anti-establishment, anti-European Union (EU), and anti-immigrant; critics accuse the party of inciting Islamophobia.) The election was the first in which a French president running for re-election failed to win the first round since the start of the Fifth Republic in 1958.

President Sarkozy campaigned on a promise to reduce France’s large budget deficit and to tax people who leave the country for tax reasons. He has also threatened to pull out of the EU passport-free zone unless other member countries do more to curb immigration from non-European countries. If Sarkozy loses the run-off, he will become the first president not to win a second term since Valery Giscard d’Estaing in 1981.

Nicolas Sarkozy (© Thibault Camus, AFP/Getty Images)

Francois Hollande wishes to refocus the response to the eurozone debt crisis on growth and jobs rather than austerity. He has promised to raise taxes on big corporations and on people earning more than 1 million euros ($1.4 million) a year. He also proposes to raise the minimum wage, hire more teachers, and lower the retirement age from 62 to 60 for some workers. If elected, Hollande would be France’s first left wing president since Francois Mitterrand, who held office between 1981 and 1995.

Additional World Book articles:

• De Gaul, Charles
• Left wing
• Right wing
• Crisis in the Eurozone (a special report)
• Economics 2011 (Back in Time article)
• France 1958 (Back in Time article)
• France 2011 (Back in Time article)