Obama and Hollande: a study in similarities

US President Barack Obama and his French counterpart Francois Hollande, who began a state visit to the US yesterday, may not have much in common on the surface.

Obama appears happily married. Hollande has just broken up with his second long-time live-in partner after being caught on camera riding a scooter to alleged trysts with an actress.

Obama is one of the most gun-shy US presidents of recent times.

Hollande has launched two interventions in Africa in under two years and was chomping at the bit to launch US-French strikes at Syria last year - until the US and Russia did a deal to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons programme.

But on closer inspection the US Democrat - whom critics call a “Socialist” - and the French Socialist - who sees himself as more of a Social Democrat - have a lot in common.

“They are the two leaders of the transatlantic community that share the same approach to economic and social questions,” veteran US correspondent Axel Krause, the Paris-based editor of Transatlantic Magazine, says.

While German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister David Cameron and the European Commission pushed austerity as the panacea to the global economic crisis in recent years Obama and Hollande put jobs front and centre.

“We have the same approach,” Hollande’s advisers emphasised on the eve of his visit.

Both have also championed “fiscal justice”.

Hollande spent the first months of his presidency hiking taxes to levels that outraged corporations called “confiscatory”.

Obama, who has made worsening inequality the main focus of his second term, has also hiked taxes on America’s richest.

For Le Figaro newspaper the meeting of two unpopular presidents was that “of two lame ducks”. 

But both Obama and Hollande are convinced they will be proven right in the long run.

Their confidence in the judiciousness of their choices has been attributed by some to their education.

Both came to the top job from top schools in their countries - Harvard University for Obama, a law graduate, and the Ecole Normale d’Administration for Hollande, an incubator of generations of French politicians.

Both succeeded populist presidents whose brash style created a craving for a more intellectual approach.

George W Bush was famous for his grammatical errors and malapropisms, while the “bling-bling” Nicolas Sarkozy confessed that classical theatre bored him and that he preferred slapstick.

Obama and Hollande cut more cerebral, aloof figures. Confronted about his alleged liaison with actress Julie Gayet at a press conference in mid-January Hollande replied archly: “I have one principle: Private matters should be dealt with privately.”