Emmanuel Macron is a spineless frog, says François Hollande

Emmanuel Macron has been lambasted as a lily-livered president with no political vision who has split France in a book by his former boss and predecessor, François Hollande.

Mr Hollande, 67, describes Mr Macron - whom he plucked from political obscurity to become his adviser and then finance minister - as a “traveller without a compass” prone to “jumping from one belief to another like a frog on water lilies”.

Affronter (Confront) is the latest and most vitriolic attacks by the Socialist - whose term ran from 2012 to 2017 - on his erstwhile protégé whose shock rise to power, it is said, he views as an act of betrayal that scuppered his albeit slim chances of re-election in 2017.

Some suggest the latest broadside could signal that Mr Hollande, whose popularity was so low at the end of his mandate that he chose not to have a crack at a second term, may be angling for an unlikely comeback, given the parlous state of the French Left.

Mr Hollande insists he has no intention of coming out of retirement. Anne Hidalgo, 62, the mayor of Paris, is the official Socialist candidate for next year’s presidential election but she is polling a paltry five per cent.

Mr Macron, meanwhile, leads the polls on 24 per cent, with Eric Zemmour, the rising star of the far-Right, in joint second with Marine Le Pen on 16 per cent.

After winning an election on promises to soak the rich and clamp down on “evil” finance, Mr Hollande then sought to win over business leaders by making Mr Macron - a former merchant banker 24 years his junior - his presidential adviser at the Elysée in 2012 and finance minister two years later.

However, Mr Macron chose to leave the government in 2016 to form his own political party and ran for office himself, nailing the final coffin in Mr Hollande’s dying re-election hopes.

In Affronter, and in media interviews to promote the book, Mr Hollande said he bore “no grudge” before giving Mr Macron both barrels over his presidential performance to date.

“This term has been marked by a lack of coherence and by the absence of a doctrine, which has led the president to multiply U-turns on essential issues, such as the role of the state, ecology and security,” he told Le Parisien.

In a separate interview with France Inter radio, he said Mr Macron “represents a technostructure that thought it could do better than politicians…but it has one major failing: it is cut off from society.”

He said his successor’s successful attempts to poach from both Left and Right “at the same time” had sowed “disorder and political confusion”, helping the rise of extremes.

He added: “He should have tried to reconcile the French. Instead…France seems split between a minority which is doing well and the rest of the country which is worried about its future.”

Under Mr Macron,“the very rich have become even richer,” claimed Mr Hollande, who accused the centrist of deserting the Left to favour policies in line with Right-wing ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Asked about the attacks, Mr Macron's government spokesman Gabriel Attal said: "We're used to it."

While Mr Hollande continues to pay lip service to Ms Hidalgo, the Paris mayor, he sniffed that other Left-wing candidates were “lilliputian”, suggesting a fresh figure may be required to ride to the rescue.