First lady or first partner?

Danielle Mitterrand, the widow of former French President Francois Mitterrand, died at age 87 last year. She became a resistance fighter at 17 and was a more passionate Socialist Party member than her husband. She was friends with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Mexican guerilla leader Subcomandante Marcos. She remained married to her husband even after he turned out to have a mistress and an out-of-wedlock daughter. She probably must have been sick of her husband’s infidelity, however, as she chose to be buried in her family`s burial ground instead of her husband’s.

Six months after Nicolas Sarkozy’s inauguration as president, his wife and first lady Cecilia divorced him in October 2007. She fell in love with an event organizer in 2005 and left her husband for a while. She returned to him as he asked her for a favor after running for president. Yet she ended up going back to her lover eventually, saying she could not remain a hypocrite. Carla Bruni, an ambitious Italian model and singer, approached the divorced Sarkozy to become first lady. He is the first president who divorced and remarried during a presidential term.

President-elect Francois Hollande has no wife but a partner, Valerie Trierweiler. She is a journalist for the weekly magazine Paris Match and hosted a political talk show on the channel Direct 8. She is often considered being from an upper-class bourgeois family because she looks cold and arrogant. Her father is disabled, however, and her mother is a cashier at a state ice rink. She is the fifth of six children. She and Hollande grew close after she interviewed him in 2005. Back then, he was living separately from his ex-partner Segolene Royale, who lost to Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election, after living together for almost three decades.

Cohabitation is common in France but Hollande is France`s first president to have a partner, not a wife. The French people are puzzled over what to call Trierweiler. It is awkward to call her Madam Hollande because she is not married, and Madam Trierweiler is weird because it is the surname of her second husband. She wants to work as a journalist because she is not the president’s wife. Then what about her role as first lady? Is it a part-time job? How she will play her role as "first partner" should prove interesting.

Editorial Writer Song Pyeong-in (pisong@donga.com)