“Will François Hollande be remembered as the Franklin Roosevelt of Europe?” It was with this question that Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century and one of France’s most vocal critics of austerity, began his reflection on Hollande’s electoral victory in 2012. There was undoubtedly a touch of irony in that question—“the comparison can make one chuckle”—but it was nonetheless an honest assessment of the forces that were already impinging on the new president and other major European leaders. In 1932, very little of what became the New Deal was spelled out in Roosevelt’s campaign against Herbert Hoover. All that Roosevelt knew was that, as Piketty writes, “the crisis of 1929 and the policies of austerity had brought the United States to its knees and that public power must reassert control over a finance capitalism on the run.” The scale of the crisis pressed Roosevelt into a daring rush of experimentation.

Piketty’s hope was that the incoming president would likewise be pressed into inventiveness and ingenuity. The crisis in Greece and the gulf between heavily indebted Southern European countries and the dynamic North would necessitate greater cooperation on fiscal policy and the mutualization of sovereign debt. Hollande, as the president of the European Union’s second pillar, would be uniquely situated to take the case for a popular redefinition of the EU to Brussels and Berlin. The rise of euro-skepticism was simultaneously a roadblock and a harbinger for dramatic change—it would create the needed opening for a departure from the norm. The rise of populism in France and across the continent would give momentum to an establishment candidate that had pledged to seriously confront inequality—Hollande became famous for the campaign promise, later aborted, to tax all annual incomes over one million euros at 75 percent.

The events of the last five years have proved that Piketty’s latent cynicism was justified. On December 1, a melancholic Hollande delivered an unannounced address to the nation. At what was the lowest point in his popularity, Hollande announced somberly that he would not seek a second presidential term. The bulk of the speech, however, was largely a defense of the many controversial decisions he made after abandoning the populism of his campaign and early mandate. Large tax credits and deductions for corporate investments and the liberalization of the labor code were designed to improve the country’s business climate and ameliorate the still stagnant employment market. “The results are here,” Hollande pleaded late in the speech, “much later than I had anticipated, I admit, but they are here.” In a climate of deep insecurity, Hollande bolstered the French security apparatus, now over a year into a state of emergency. The one regret that the president admitted: proposing in the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris attacks a constitutional reform that would have enabled the nullification of citizenship for individuals convicted of terrorism.

The reform never passed. In fact, it added fuel to a growing revolt within a Socialist Party rapidly losing confidence in its own president. Hollande’s decision to step aside was born out of a frank assessment that his candidacy would do more to divide than unify a French left that had become demoralized and balkanized during his tenure. He concluded his address by hoping that his renunciation would enable “a collective spark that would encourage all progressives to unify.”

This plea has been echoed in recent weeks by numerous calls for some form of grand primary of progressives, which would take the place of the Socialist primary currently scheduled for late January. Though Francois Fillon of Les Républicains and Marine Le Pen of the National Front are the front-runners in recent polls, the wide field of “progressives,” from centrist neoliberals to left-wing populists, could, if unified around one candidate, form a commanding coalition. The reality is that the growing chasm between these two poles will likely prevent such an alliance from holding.

