French president mortified as love triangle eclipses eurozone crisis

François Hollande might have thought the eurozone crisis and the question of France’s spiralling public debt would have knocked his love life off the front pages. …

But the Trierweiler v Royal saga continued this week as Royal told a magazine of her hurt feelings; Trierweiler told a paper through an unnamed “friend” that she had made an “error”; and French satirists leapt on it. The French equivalent of Spitting Image, Les Guignols, ran the latest in a regular series of sketches of a buffoon-like Hollande caught between sparring, jealous partners in what promises to be the longest-running joke of the presidency. …

Her contributions read like a campaign diary: “He takes me in his arms, safe from view. I cry, he laughs,” she writes of the night he won the Socialist primary race.