THE French government’s humiliating climbdown last week over its youth employment law has boosted the campaign by the Socialist Ségolène Royal to become the first female French president.

Royal, a photogenic mother of four, leads the field of Socialists in the race to win the party’s nomination in next year’s presidential election. According to opinion polls, she would beat Nicolas Sarkozy, the most likely centre-right contender, by two to four points if the election were held today.

Surveys conducted before the government’s retreat had put the two neck and neck.

After weeks of protests, President Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, his prime minister, were forced on Monday to withdraw a law intended to reduce unemployment among the young by injecting some flexibility into the rigid labour code.

The surrender did not bode well for any future effort at implementing more wide-ranging reform and highlighted the powerlessness of a discredited governing team.

Parliament approved a set of measures to replace the first employment contract, which would have made it easier to fire young people in the first two years.

Instead, the government is promising more training for youths and companies will be granted subsidies to recruit young people with poor qualifications. The volte-face appeared to have put paid to the presidential ambitions of de Villepin, who had insisted that he would never bow to pressure from the street.

While Chirac and de Villepin saw their approval ratings plummet, Sarkozy, the interior minister, emerged from the fiasco with his popularity relatively intact, even if he has lost some ground against Royal.

He was careful to distance himself from the initiative and called for negotiations with unions at an early stage. For him, however, withdrawal of the law is a particularly depressing result.

Sarkozy has built his campaign to become president on the need for a “rupture” with the past, saying bold economic reforms are necessary if France is to keep up with the rest of the world. The resistance generated by such a small change to the labour code, however, demonstrated how difficult bringing in changes will be.

The Socialist party has been greatly cheered by the government’s humiliation but leading figures vying for the presidential nomination have been unable to catch Royal.

She effectively launched her presidential campaign on television last week by confirming in an interview what everybody already knew: that she would indeed be seeking the party’s nomination as presidential candidate for the election in May next year if “things stayed the same”.

According to one of the polls, Royal was the candidate people had most faith in to carry out economic reforms. She may also be able to lure voters from the centre who have been alienated by Sarkozy’s conservatism: he was accused of inflaming tensions in immigrant suburbs last year by referring to rioters as “scum”.

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