LE BOURGET, France ? The Socialist candidate for France's presidency is attempting to consolidate his front-runner status on Sunday with the most high profile appearance of his campaign so far.
Observers say Francois Hollande, a bespectacled 57-year-old career politician, needs to inject a dose of dynamism into his campaign with the afternoon speech to an expected 10,000 people at an exhibition hall outside Paris.
Hollande plans to show French voters "where I come from, the meaning of my work over the past 20 years, and how I prepared to take on this responsibility," he told Le Monde newspaper in an interview published Saturday.
Hollande has extended his lead in polls over French President Nicolas Sarkozy, his expected rival in two-round elections in April and May. But he's virtually unknown outside France, and critics say he has limited international experience to head this nuclear-armed nation.
Hollande is an affable, soft-spoken and witty former longtime party boss who was chosen as the Socialist candidate in a primary last October.
He won the job after the most anticipated Socialist front-runner, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, had his is political career all but ended when he was jailed briefly in May in the United States after a New York hotel maid accused him of rape. Prosecutors later dropped the case, but Strauss-Kahn's reputation and presidential ambitions crashed.
Hollande has so far pitched his campaign on representing the anti-Sarkozy. When asked "Why you?" in an interview in October, Hollande first answered: "Because I can beat Nicolas Sarkozy."
He is known as good on the stump and a quick-witted debater, and has built his reputation as a manager and consensus-builder more than as a visionary.
He's never run a government ministry and during his tenure the party was weakened and badly fractured.
A lawmaker in the National Assembly and the governor of the central Correze region ? the same political backyard as conservative former President Jacques Chirac ? Hollande led the Socialist Party from 1997 to 2008.
During that time the Socialists suffered two devastating presidential campaign defeats, including the 2002 election when Prime Minister Lionel Jospin embarrassingly failed to qualify for the presidential runoff. Hollande's former partner Segolene Royal ? the mother of his four children ? was defeated by Sarkozy in the last presidential elections in 2007.
Hollande's program calls for reversing cuts in education introduced by Sarkozy's government, a new work contract to encourage companies to hire young people and focus on reducing France's high state budget deficit. It says little about international affairs, other than calling for an unspecified "pact" with Germany, the EU's economic engine, to spur on the now-troubled European project.
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Greg Keller can be reached at http://twitter.com/Greg_Keller
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