During the election campaign last year, François Hollande was attacked for being too indecisive, and nicknamed "Flamby" after a dessert – not exactly in the superman category. Seven months later, the same Hollande sanctioned an operation by French commandos in Somalia to try and rescue a French hostage, and started an unpredictable war in France's former colony of Mali. He received support from mainstream opposition leaders who oppose him on almost every other issue – and from Britain too, which has agreed military assistance to help transport foreign troops and equipment to Mali.
Nothing predestined this Socialist apparatchik to become a war president, particularly after having campaigned for the early return of French troops from Afghanistan, which was completed a few weeks ago.
Soon after he was elected last May, Hollande designed a strategy for the Mali crisis, which had erupted a few months earlier when radical Islamist groups took over the northern half of the country and imposed tough sharia laws over the population. The new president didn't want to see French troops leading the battle, as has happened in the past – for example in Chad, when Libyan tanks were threatening its southern neighbour. Hollande wanted to show times had changed.
As a sign of his new, non-interventionist approach to France's former colonies, Hollande only last month refused publicly to answer calls from President François Bozizé of the Central African Republic, for French troops to come and stop a rebel advance towards its capital. Hollande said: "We are not present to protect a regime … That time is over."
Meanwhile, he campaigned hard to get UN and African backing for a regional force for Mali, led by west African states. But despite a UN security council resolution and unanimous approval, the plan had got nowhere when the al-Qaida affiliated Islamist groups began an offensive southwards, easily overcoming Malian army resistance.
Hollande made what was probably the only possible option on his desk: send in French power to prevent the heavily armed and highly mobile rebel column from reaching the city of Mopti and later the capital, Bamako, home to around 6,000 French citizens.
The French president made sure everyone concerned was still on board. He had a UN security council resolution on his side, and had made contact with African countries, with European partners, with the US. But in the end, France went alone and fought back the column with a helicopter raid in which a French officer lost his life. Fighting has been continuing since, and reinforcements are arriving every day in Mali.
Hollande therefore finds himself in the reluctant position taken by every one of his predecessors, from Charles de Gaulle to Nicolas Sarkozy: having the power to change the course of history in an African country with just a few hundred men, helicopters and jets. Not exactly the change he had in mind when elected.
But abstaining when the Malian president sent an SOS last week would have meant taking a risk no French president wants to take. He would have been held responsible for the eventual fall of Bamako to radical Islamists, with its potential destabilisation of the whole west African region – including neighbouring Niger, France's main source of uranium for its nuclear industry.
Although it has largely taken a back seat in sub-Saharan Africa – compared with the first decades of the post-colonial era when it was clearly running the show – France remains a power to be reckoned with on the continent. Failing to act in such a crisis would have been seen by every French-speaking African government as a sign that France is no longer a reliable ally.
An untold dimension of the equation is that France is fighting in Mali in a conflict with potential consequences at home. French leaders are worried that a success by fundamentalists in countries that have close ties with France might influence the radicalisation of young French Muslims. The case of Mohammed Merah, the Toulouse gunman – trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan – who killed Jewish children last April, is still on everyone's mind.
Embattled at home over his economic policies, rising unemployment, tax controversies, and a huge conservative backlash against the introduction of gay marriage, Hollande has shown his muscle where no one expected: on the battlefield.
