Ségolène Royal sought to revive her flagging campaign for the French presidency yesterday by re-embracing her Socialist Party and casting herself as a modernising champion of the State and the suffering lower paid.

As a Paris crowd of 15,000 chanted “Ségolène, Président,” Ms Royal, 53, promised higher wages and pensions, a stronger welfare state and more protection against foreign competition as she set out her manifesto for the April election.

“I can offer you something more than a manifesto — a pact of honour, a presidential pact that I propose to everyone, the most vulnerable and the strong, those who have been our supporters all along and those who have not, because France needs all its people,” Ms Royal said.

She pitched her two-hour speech with gravity, adopting a statesman’s tone new to her. In the past month the excitement that once surrounded her has faded since Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right candidate, seized the spotlight with a more dynamic campaign and Ms Royal exposed the depth of her ignorance of foreign-policy issues.

Yesterday she tried to rekindle that excitement, aiming to revive her distinctive cross-party appeal while consolidating support on the left, especially among public sector and lower-paid workers.

While the crowd applauded a long catalogue of policy proposals, Ms Royal stirred fer-vour when she reverted to her lyrical rhetoric and spoke as a mother who understands the troubles of ordinary families.

“For every child born here, I want to accomplish what I wanted for my own children,” the former schools and family affairs minister said.

In her appearance at Villepinte, near Charles de Gaulle airport, Ms Royal reached out to the party from which she had distanced herself in her campaign for the nomination. The most striking symbol of this was her bright red jacket and skirt — the Socialist colour — rather than the white suits that have been her trademark. She used a red back-drop instead of the sky blue of her highly personal early campaign. And she announced a new slogan: “A fairer France will be a stronger France” instead of the previous “Progress for all and respect for each”.

The party leadership, including François Hollande, its chief and her domestic partner, and her former rivals for the candidacy, applauded from the front as Ms Royal defined herself as heir to France’s left-wing tradition as represented by François Mitterrand, the last Socialist president and her first boss.

Emulating Mitterrand’s victorious 1981 campaign, Ms Royal listed 100 proposals for reform. Her team gleaned these from 6,000 town meetings that they have staged around the country since last November. They included promises to boost small pensions by 5 per cent, to consolidate the 35-hour maximum working week, to lift the minimum wage to €1,500 (£1,000) from €1,254. She also proposed tax breaks to encourage trade union membership.

She revived earlier proposals to establish military-style training camps for young offenders and “citizen juries” to evaluate the work of central and local government. Justice had to be swifter and firmer among young delinquents, she said.

The ideas, which drew fire from the Left as populist, reflect Ms Royal’s belief that France needs greater discipline and a sense of individual responsibility. On schools, she was applauded again as she aired the slogan that she borrowed from Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign: “Education, education, education.”

Ms Royal emphasised the need for France to bring down its swelling national debt, but made no attempt to explain how she would finance the generous new schemes that she proposed. She also sought to allay doubts about her qualifications on foreign policy by setting out an agenda for new French leadership in Europe and the world. She called for new rules to ensure “fair competition” in international and European trade. “Europe cannot just be a free-trade zone appended to Nato,” she said. “Europe must not abandon itself to the sole doctrine of competition.” This meant agreement among all EU states on taxation. She also called for a revamp of the Common Agricultural Policy to strengthen its support of smaller farmers and protecting the environment.

She offered no change in approach to the United States, saying that France would stand up to Washington whenever it deemed that it was abusing its power, as it had in Iraq.

Ms Royal appeared to have reignited the confidence of her party after a month of gaffes and blunders, but her opponents lambasted her for reverting to antique Socialist doctrines.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, said that Ms Royal had merely “preached to her constituency of civil servants and public sector workers without explaining where the money will come from”.

Mr Sarkozy, the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement, tried to upstage Ms Royal with his own, smaller, Paris rally in the morning. He charged her with retreating into a left-wing ghetto. “I want to speak to the French, all the French,” he said. “For me, they are all equal in rights and duties. That is the difference.”

Pact of honour

Domestic

- Raise minimum wage to €1,500 (£1,000) from €1,250

- Raise basic old age pension by 5 per cent

- Lifelong guarantee of housing

- Build 120,000 new council homes per year

- Military “boot camp” for young offenders

- Open school zoning to promote better social and ethnic mix

- Heavy support for renewable energy, to reach 20 per cent of energy consumed in 2020

- Reduction of dependence on nuclear energy (now 80 per cent of electricity)

- Tax on television advertising to finance public-service broadcasting

Europe

- Creation of economic government of eurozone to promote growth

- Impose “tax floors” to prevent EU states from undercutting each other to attract jobs and investment

- Rebuild Common Agricultural Policy to favour environmental protection and smaller farmers

International

- Support multipolar world to balance US power

- Create world agriculture policy to regulate markets and help farmers in poor countries

Source: party literature

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