In the week after France lost its AAA credit rating, Gandrange is the perfect double symbol of France's economic sorrow and its disenchantment with Sarkozy.
Before he was elected in 2007, Sarkozy promised to "pluck growth with my teeth". He promised to make the French "work more and earn more".
Five years later, French unemployment is at 9.7 per cent, the highest for 11 years. The French state debt has grown by €630 billion ($1 trillion), of which €100 billion can be blamed on the post-2008 global crisis.
Hollande, 57, the poll favourite to become the next president on May 6, has come to Lorraine in eastern France to promise to do better. Or perhaps not to promise exactly. Promise is a word that the thoughtful, cautious, likeable, plodding Socialist candidate uses sparingly.
The Gandrange visit is also emblematic of Hollande's enigmatic and low-key campaign.
In a series of whistle-stops in Lorraine this week, the Socialist candidate generated polite applause but little enthusiasm. Part of him remains the plump, slightly dishevelled Francois Hollande, who has been a respected, likeable, unexciting member of the centre-left elite in France for 20 years. Part of him is a slender, smartly dressed and over-coached new Hollande.
"I'll tell you what irritates me about him," said Vincent Spataro, 65, a Socialist supporter who joined the small welcoming crowd in Gandrange.
"It is when he tries to imitate [the late President] Francois Mitterrand with all those exaggerated gesticulations. He should be calmer. He should be himself."
The Socialist candidate spoke in Gandrange of "rebuilding confidence" and of "re-igniting hope". He wrote this month of his mission to "rekindle the magic of the French dream".
The Sarkozy camp accuses Hollande of having no clear or detailed proposals. In some ways, he has too many proposals (although the detail tends to shift around a little).
On his Lorraine trip he spoke of new policies for state and regional industrial investment and tax breaks for companies which hire apprentices while keeping older workers in their jobs.
He spoke of his plan to hire 60,000 new front-line teachers over five years, which may, or may not, be new posts.
Asked to promise a new law to ban the closure of profit-making factories, he said he would "consider whether such legislation is feasible".
Such language falls short of the shining promise conjured up by words like "hope" and "confidence" and "dream". In a time of big questions, Hollande offers small answers. There appears to be a missing link between the likeable policy wonk and the new statesman who wants to rouse a wounded nation.
Nine weeks from the first round of voting on April 22, Hollande has yet to find a compelling voice or "narrative".
No matter, say his aides. The campaign proper has not started. Hollande, they say, will be proclaiming his vision at his first large campaign rally at Le Bourget, just north of Paris, this Sunday.
Other Hollande supporters are nervous. Although their man tops every opinion poll, February is usually the month in which French presidential voting intentions shift radically or solidify.
"In 2002 and 2007, the presidential campaigns slipped through our fingers at about this stage almost without us realising it," one Socialist politician said.
Vincent Schweitzer, a Hollande activist in Lorraine, said: "The mood on the street is strongly anti-Sarko but it is not yet pro-Hollande ... We still have a lot of work to do to convince them."
The danger does not come from President Sarkozy alone. Polls point to the possibility of a three- or even four-horse race to the first round finishing post. Only the top two candidates go into the second round.
A rough poll-of-polls puts Hollande on 26 to 29 per cent, Sarkozy on 22 to 24 per cent, the far-right National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen, on 18 to 21 per cent and the centrist candidate, Francois Bayrou, on about 15 per cent.
Hollande has campaigned as if Sarkozy's unpopularity was the only key he needed to the Elysee Palace. That could change this weekend.
Socialist party sources say Hollande's Le Bourget speech - which he is writing himself - will try to bridge the credibility gap between his "new French dream" rhetoric and his clunky, technocratic policy proposals.
That, apparently, is a promise.
- Independent
