Paris, February 5, 2007: 7pm

On a cold winter night I catch a taxi to the edge of the 13th Arrondissement in Paris. The taxi driver is grumpy. He moans about the traffic. The journey takes 45 minutes, but when we reach our destination, there’s a huge crowd and the driver suddenly smiles. “Ah, Ségolène!” he says. “Maman Ségo!” I am here, along with 7,000 others, to see Ségolène Royal’s first Paris election rally. It takes nearly an hour to reach the door of the Halle Georges Carpentier, and I am sandwiched between hard-core political activists, pensioners, young people, mothers carrying babies. I eavesdrop. I expect talk of rising taxes, the environment, unemployment. But no. A young mother to a friend: “I wonder if she’ll wear white again tonight?” A white jacket – often by designer Paule Ka – is Ségolène Royal’s trademark.

This is not the Paris of postcard lovers kissing on the Pont Neuf. This is grimy Paris – ugly high-rise buildings crowded with immigrant families. So it’s the right place for the colonel’s daughter, graduate of the École National d’Administration (alma mater of top politicians and civil servants), former junior minister under Mitterand, and president of the Poitou-Charentes region of Western France, to play the socialist card. In France, there has never been an equivalent of the Blair revolution, and the left still really are the left. So Royal criticises banks, globalisation – anyone who makes money. Meanwhile, the crowd goes wild. “Ségolène, Présidente!” screeches a Tahitian man beating his chest. A teenager wears a T-shirt bearing the word “SEGOSPHERE”, name of the youth website partly run by Ségolène’s son, Thomas.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the brilliant former Finance Minister is here, in the front row. But absent is Lionel Jospin, the former Socialist prime minister. Strauss-Kahn and Jospin are some of the so-called “elephants”, the political old guard who mocked the lovely Ségo when she wrestled the Socialist Party nomination from their very hands last November. Now they have no choice but to give support. “A Gazelle among the Elephants” is how the French press put it. Then, suddenly, smiling her beatific smile, she is on stage. Maman Ségo. Mother of the nation. Joan of Arc, but prettier.

Three-piece suit, low heels, shiny hair. She raises her hand and the crowd goes quiet. I leave thinking that this is a woman who clearly knows how to push buttons. But I also keep thinking about what one of her colleagues at ENA once said: “Everyone thinks she is nice and not clever. But the truth is, she is very clever and absolutely not nice.”

February 19

So who is Ségolène Royal? She was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1953, the fourth of eight siblings and raised in an authoritarian Catholic household, which was austere even by the standards of Fifties colonial life. After rebelling against this upbringing, Ségolène rose through the ranks of the Socialist Party with her partner of 27 years, Francois Hollande, the son of a doctor, whom she met at ENA, and with whom she has four children. She has always refused to marry, because she felt that the institution betrayed her mother. But if anyone in Ségolène Royal’s own partnership has lost out, it is arguably Hollande, who became the leader of the Socialists, and might have been expected to run for president had Ségolène not eclipsed him. “I should have been the candidate,” he said in an interview. “But I thought, if Ségolène has more of a chance, I won’t stand in her way.” And indeed, last summer’s photographs of a tanned Ségolène in a bikini and a baseball hat seemed to seal her fate. The public was astounded by the taut abdominal muscles of a woman close to her 53rd birthday. In a sense, that was the end of her tubby husband’s chance of being front-runner.

After being elected president of Poitou-Charentes in 2004, Ségolène used her popularity with the electorate as a weapon with which to conquer the party.

She first hinted at a run for the presidency in Paris Match in 2005, and in the same year appeared on the cover of the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur with the words: “And if it was her?” That’s when Ségo mania started. In winning the nomination, she beat two of the “elephants” – former prime minister Laurent Fabius, alleged to have said, “But who will look after the children?”, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, alleged to have said that she spoke as if she was “reading from her recipe cards”. After winning, she appointed them as “strategic counsel”, partially appeasing them. But she also said, “Gazelles run faster than elephants.” Many people are disappointed that Hollande, a political animal who understands the party structure, is not running. He is clever, witty, and when he sinks his teeth into someone, he goes for it. But no one could imagine him as a candidate. It would be, says one political observer, “like putting a fat boy in a 100-metre race”.

In that sense, people do feel that Ségolène is a compromise – the only person the Socialists could lay their hands on who could be popular enough to stand a chance against the Conservative Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Ségolène’s big promise has been to listen to people – about the woeful economy, the troubled health service, and the need to reform the crippled welfare state. But her detractors say that when she comes to talk she is less impressive. She lacks substance, they say. Specifically, she is hazy on foreign policy and the economy. Her platform has, quite literally, been cobbled together from public opinion – including the two million-plus visitors to her website.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that some of her ideas seem disjointed. She has attacked the sacred 35-hour week, but also called for state financing of trade unions and a ¤250-a-month increase in the minimum wage. She says she wants to create more jobs for young people, but won’t promise a radical overhaul of the rigid job contracts that put employers off hiring. While mostly a social liberal, she has called for boot camps for young offenders.

Everyone I know insists they won’t vote for her, but the kids in the banlieue who registered in December and who want to keep out Sarkozy – who famously called them scum during the 2005 riots – are all voting for her.

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