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François Hollande biography

QUICK FACTS

NAME
François Hollande

OCCUPATION
President of France

BIRTH DATE
August 12, 1954

EDUCATION
École des Hautes Études Commerciales, Paris, École Nationale d’Administration, Strasbourg, Institut de Sciences Politiques, Paris

PLACE OF BIRTH
Rouen, France

ZODIAC SIGN
Leo



François Hollande is the 24th president of France, and a member of the Socialist Party. He succeeded Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012.


Synopsis

François Hollande was born in Rouen, France in 1954. He attended a series of elite French schools and joined the Socialist Party in 1979.

First elected to the Ussel town council, he went on to win a National Assembly seat in 1988. He was made chair of the Socialist Party and announced a bid for the presidency in 2011, and beat incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy to become France's 24th president in 2012.

Early life

François Gérard Georges Nicolas Hollande was born on August 12, 1954, in Rouen, France to a right-wing physician father and a progressive social worker mother.

The family moved to Paris when Hollande was 13, and after graduating from the public school system, he attended the Institut de Sciences Politiques and then the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, France's top business school. He then entered the École Nationale d'Administration.

Hollande demonstrated an early interest in politics and volunteered for François Mitterrand's second unsuccessful presidential campaign while he was still a student. Five years later, in 1979, he joined the Socialist Party. By then, Mitterrand had been elected on his third try and he appointed Hollande a junior economic advisor. Hollande held this post until he went to work for Max Gallo, the press secretary to former prime minister Pierre Mauroy.In 1983, Hollande began serving on the Ussel town council and was elected to the National Assembly in 1988. Although he lost his seat in 1993, he reclaimed it in 1997. That same year, Lionel Jospin tapped Hollande to be the Socialist Party chairman.  Hollande was then elected mayor of Tulle in 2001 and held the post until 2008

In March 2011, Hollande announced that he would seek the Socialist Party nomination for president. He faced five other candidates in the primary, including Ségolène Royal and the frontrunner, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn. When Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York on sexual assault charges, Hollande took the lead in polls. He won the party's nomination on October 16, 2011. The following January, Hollande outlined a list of policies that he would seek to enact if elected, including increasing taxes on corporations, reducing the retirement age, establishing a public investment bank to promote French industry, and granting marriage and adoptions rights to same-sex couples.President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that he would seek re-election in February 2012 and promptly began criticizing Hollande’s proposals, claiming they would be disastrous for the economy. Polls initially showed a close race, but Hollande pulled ahead comfortably in the second ballot. He won France's presidential election on May 6, 2012 and was sworn in on May 15. He was the first candidate in 31 years to unseat an incumbent president after a single term.

While a student at Ecole Nationale d'Administration University, Hollande met and began dating Ségolène Royal. They lived as domestic partners but did not marry, having four children together. Royal had political aspirations of her own and, in 2007, ran for the presidency against Hollande's wishes. A few weeks after her defeat, the couple announced their separation.Mere days after they made the announcement, Royal published a book accusing Hollande of having an affair with Valerie Trierweiler, a political journalist with Paris Match. Hollande admitted to the affair, and he and Trierweiler have been together since.In January 2014, photos published in Closer magazine allegedly showed Hollande being taken via a scooter to a Paris apartment that had recently been lent to French actress Julie Gayet. The photos spurred wide speculation about an alleged affair between the president and the actress. In addition to this scandal, reports claimed that the apartment where Hollande and Gayet had met was connected to the Corsican mafia.

Dilma Rousseff biography

QUICK FACTS

NAME
Dilma Rousseff

OCCUPATION
President of Brazil

BIRTH DATE
December 14, 1947

PLACE OF BIRTH
Belo Horizonte, Brazil

FULLNAME
Dilma Vana Rousseff

NICKNAME
Iron Lady


Synopsis

Rousseff was raised in an upper-middle-class household. Her father was a lawyer who immigrated to Brazil from Bulgaria, and her mother was a teacher. In 1964 Brazil’s president was overthrown by a coalition of civilian and military officials, and the teenaged Rousseff became involved in the left-wing opposition to the government. She was associated with the militant group National Liberation Command (Comando de Libertação Nacional; Colina), and she married fellow activist Cláudio Galeno Linhares in 1968.

After a raid on a Colina safe house resulted in police fatalities, the pair went into hiding in Rio de Janeiro. She and Galeno later fled Rio de Janeiro for Porto Alegre, subsequently separated, and in 1981 divorced.

Rousseff moved to São Paulo, and it was there in 1970 that she was arrested by government forces. She was imprisoned for three years on the charge of subversion and during that time was subjected to torture by her captors.Upon her release in 1973, Rousseff resumed her education; she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre in 1977.

As the grip of the dictatorship weakened, Rousseff became active in local politics, and she was appointed finance secretary for Porto Alegre in 1986. She left that position in 1988 and later spent two years as president of the Foundation of Economics and Statistics of Rio Grande do Sul state (1991–93).

Road to presidency

She returned to government work in 1993 as secretary of mines, energy, and communications for Rio Grande do Sul, and she was credited with increasing energy efficiency and power production within the state. Rousseff left that post in 1994 and later pursued a Ph.D. in economics. Before receiving the degree, however, she was called back to her former government post in 1999, and it was there that she became affiliated with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores). Her standing in the party quickly rose, and she left her government job in 2002 to serve on the staff of Lula’s successful presidential campaign.Upon taking office in 2003, Lula appointed Rousseff minister of mines and energy, and she was named chair of the Brazilian state-run oil concern Petrobrás. Rousseff emphasized the need for Petrobrás to expand its production capacity, and in 2005 Lula appointed her his chief of staff.

An expanding economy and a shrinking poverty rate boosted Lula’s popularity, but he faced a constitutional limit of two terms, so he began grooming Rousseff to be his successor.

She stepped down from Petrobrás in March 2010 to prepare for her presidential campaign. In the first round of voting, in early October, Rousseff failed to capture the 50 percent of votes needed to avoid a runoff. In the second round, held later that month, she won a commanding victory,
capturing some 56 percent of votes. She was sworn into office on January 1, 2011. Making her the first ever Brasilian female president.

In October 2014 she won the brazilian presidential poll, and waa re-elected


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