THE old church bell struck five o’clock and Ségolãne Royal, the Socialist
presidential candidate, let out a peal of laughter. She had just arrived in
the village where she grew up in eastern France and her senses were being
assailed by a host of childhood memories.
“I remember that bell,” she said, walking along a cobbled street. “I heard it
every day for most of my childhood.”
Royal, or “Ségo”, as they refer to the first woman with a real chance of
winning the presidency, returned to her rural roots last week in an attempt
to present herself as the candidate most in touch with the Gallic soul.
“I remember the smells, the colours, the changing of the seasons,” she said
under a deep blue sky in Chamagne, a village of 454 inhabitants in the
Vosges, where she lived in the 1960s and 1970s. “Sunday walks in the forest
picking mushrooms. Winters when it was so cold that we had to sleep fully
clothed. That childhood forged my destiny.”
With one week to go before voting, questions of identity and character have
come to dominate the battle for power as a nostalgic nation in need of
renewal and deeply disillusioned with its ruling elite agonises over which
candidate best embodies “la belle France”.
The top two scorers will face off in a second round on May 6, given the
impossibility of any one of the 12 candidates scoring more than 50% next
Sunday: all branches of the eccentric and fractious French family are
represented on the ballot, from a postman revolutionary to a pipe-smoking
antiglobalisation guru.
Yet seldom has an election generated so much excitement and so many
expectations of change. The frontrunners — Royal, 53, the conservative
Nicolas Sarkozy, 52, and the centrist François Bayrou, 55, are much younger
than previous incumbents and would bring a dramatic shift in presidential
style and substance.
With an ambivalent relationship to capitalism that is, perhaps, a hangover
from their revolution 200 years ago, the French have yet to embrace the free
market with the gusto of the rest of the world. There is no politician who
breeds as much antipathy as Sarkozy, a diminutive figure with the enormous —
and some say unreachable — ambition of making France more competitive and
hard-working.
“Sarko”, a former interior minister and son of a Hungarian immigrant, enjoys a
clear lead in the opinion polls and is being mobbed like a rock star at
rallies across the land with his “work more, earn more” promise of
renaissance.
Renowned for his restless energy and capacity for nonstop work, he has been
hurt recently by allegations that a volatile temperament renders him unfit
for the most powerful executive post in Europe.
That was nothing compared with an insult from Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right
National Front leader who suggested last week that Sarkozy, although born
and raised in an affluent Parisian suburb, was “not French enough” to be
president because of his Hungarian father.
“It is not in good taste to present yourself as a candidate when you do not
represent the people you are pretending to represent,” said Le Pen, 78, who
caused a political earthquake in the 2002 election by coming second, a feat
that he hopes to pull off again on Sunday.
Sarkozy has tried to soften his rough edges by highlighting a sensitive
streak. But it may not have worked in the face of a relentless Socialist
campaign to caricature him as a dangerous lunatic intent on selling the
country into free market slavery.
His campaign slogan is “together, everything becomes possible” — a mantra
parodied last week in a speech by Royal who said, to raucous applause from a
crowd in the city of Metz, “Yes, with them, anything is possible, even the
worst.”
Can she beat him? Polls indicated that Royal and Sarkozy would be the
finalists on May 6 but strong showings from the “third man” Bayrou and from
Le Pen, who dismisses Royal as an irrelevant lightweight, have made the
outcome uncertain.
Royal’s advisers could hardly disguise their concern. Even Libération, the
bible of the “gauche caviare” Parisian elite, was sounding the alarm. “Let
us be frank,” it said. “The Royal campaign is not at its best.”
The French, say analysts, like an air of calm authority in their presidents
and in this the fidgety Sarkozy, for all his other attributes, was
considered to be lacking. Royal, by contrast, was trying to be a picture of
composure as she walked up the street on Thursday to her old home in
Chamagne.
Paint has peeled off the shutters, giving the house where she lived with her
seven brothers and sisters — it is now occupied by a cousin — an air of
neglect.
“We used to pick plums,” she recalled with a chuckle, looking up at the ivy
clinging to the facade. “There’s nothing better than a juicy plum,” she
added, recalling that what was not used for tarts or jam would end up in her
grandfather’s “rocket fuel” brandy.
The biggest danger to her on Sunday — the candidate who could replace her in
the second round against Sarkozy — is the tractor-loving Bayrou, the
part-time horse breeder and farmer who wants a “national unity” government
and who, until now, seems to have had the monopoly on the French countryside.
Royal seemed to be thinking of him when, to sum up what she had absorbed from
her childhood, she said: “In rural areas like this you live in permanent
communion with nature. I think it gives you a very strong internal serenity.”
There was one big cloud hovering over this otherwise happy childhood. Jacques,
her father, was a strict army colonel who believed that daughters were not
fit for higher education and liked to say: “I have five children and three
girls.”
“Our family life was not always joyous,” said Royal, who was born in Senegal,
where her father was posted, and spent the first few years of her life in
Martinique, another army posting, before the family settled in Chamagne when
she was 11. “I had a hard upbringing.”
This sounded like an understatement to one of her brothers, who had his head
shaved regularly as a punishment for the slightest wrongdoing.
“He would give us these terrible thrashings,” said Antoine Royal, who lives
not far from Chamagne and is a leading member of the local Royal support
committee. He left home at the age of 17. “I’d joke to people, ‘It feels
like I’ve been in the army for 17 years’.” He said that when he was 14 he
had a dream that his sister, then 16, would become president. “At the time
it seemed really odd,” he confided. “I had no idea why I was dreaming about
her in the Elysée Palace. It was long before she had expressed any interest
in politics. Now I know. I’ve always been sure she will make it.”
The children were looked after when they were small by Marie Thérãse Jolain,
92, the family’s former cleaning lady, who went up to Royal on Thursday and
gave her a pinch on the cheek.
She later described the candidate as “a serious little girl” and said that she
had helped her mother with the children “because I know how hard it is when
you’ve got so many all at the same time”.
Nicolas Normier, another former acquaintance of Royal, held up her old
geography exercise book from when she was 13. “Look,” he said. “Her
handwriting has not changed one bit since then.”
At the age of 19, Royal sued her father, who had left his wife, because he
refused a divorce and paid no alimony or child support to finance his
children’s education. She won the case after a long battle in court, shortly
before her father died of lung cancer in 1981.
Gérard, another brother, became a secret agent and led the unit that blew up
the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace vessel, in Auckland harbour in 1985.
Analysing the tortured Royal family history has kept various biographers busy.
The oppressive family background, these authors grimly concur, must have
stiffened her political resolve.
Similar claims are made by the biographers of Sarkozy, who dwell on the
difficult relationship that he had with his father.
A Hungarian aristocrat who fled communism to settle in France in the late
1940s, Sarkozy Sr abandoned his wife when Nicolas was a little boy and
remarried twice. He had two more children with his second wife. Parental
abandonment, it is claimed, must have helped to forge the future
politician’s steely determination to win.
Royal seemed just as determined, however. Despite Sarkozy’s lead in the polls
most analysts believe that if she got into the second round, Royal’s “serene
force”, as she liked to call it, could start to appeal to a broader
electorate.
Having returned to her family roots last week, she also appears to have gone
back to her ideological origins.
Over the past few years the French electorate has made its disenchantment with
the ruling elite abundantly clear and has seemed interested more in
personalities and policies than in political parties, say analysts.
“They are comparing personalities and promises the way they compare products
in a supermarket,” said Roland Cayrol, director of CSA, a polling
organisation. “The look and the packaging are important.”
Even so, having initially ventured far beyond Socialist boundaries in search
of votes — it would have warmed her late father’s heart, no doubt, to hear
her advocating boot camp for unruly teenagers — Royal last week aimed to
dispel any doubts about her Socialist credentials.
Denouncing “les golden parachutes” — handsome payouts to departing company
bosses — as one of the iniquities of the capitalist system, Royal demanded
that Noël Forgeard, former head of EADS, parent company of Airbus, the
European plane maker, hand back an award of £5m.
She also described as “dangerous” Sarkozy’s plans to make patients pay some
part of the cost of drugs and doctors’ visits. “I will be the president who
will guarantee our social model, our republican model, who will save the
social security system and who will even consolidate it,” she promised.
That sort of rhetoric causes despair among reform-minded analysts such as
Nicolas Baverez, the historian and economist who has argued that France’s
national decline can be halted only by sweeping economic reforms.
“She wants the generalisation of the 35-hour week, higher salaries and
pensions financed by debt and the unlimited extension of the welfare state,”
he said. “That would translate into an acceleration of the economic and
social crisis.”
Sarkozy, too, has zigzagged across policy territory, most recently by poaching
on the preserve of Le Pen with his call for a ministry for immigration and
national identity.
In the final stretch of the race, however, he appears just as eager to return
to his political roots and dispel any doubts about his reformist
credentials. It may not seem much to outsiders, but in France it qualified
as revolutionary talk when he questioned the validity of inheritance tax
last week.
“It is not wrong for parents who have worked all their life to leave something
to their children,” he said. Few beyond the columnists of Libération would
disagree with that.
There was one big obstacle in his path. “Sarkozy still has to win the
affection of the people,” said Pierre Mazeaud, a constitutional expert. “He
must find the necessary calm.”
Royal — the “Madonna of Chamagne”, as one observer called her — could teach
him a thing or two about that.
Sarko: the Hungarian link
Nicolas Sarkozy was born on January 28, 1955, in Paris to Pal Sarkozy de
Nagy-Bocsa, a Hungarian aristocrat who fled communism in the late 1940s, and
Andrée Mallah, daughter of a wealthy French urologist. The couple had two
other sons but Sarkozy Sr left his wife in 1959. His mother then worked as a
lawyer to support the family. His maternal grandfather used to carry him on
his shoulders to see General de Gaulle on Armistice Day.
Sarkozy worked for two years as an ice-cream seller and a flower delivery boy
to finance his law studies. He became mayor of Neuilly at 28.
Ségo: a hard French upbringing
Ségolãne Royal was born on September 22, 1953, in Dakar, Senegal, to Jacques
Royal, a colonel in the French army, and Hélãne Dehaye. She was one of eight
children born in nine years. The family lived in Martinique before settling
in Chamagne, eastern France, when Royal was 11.
Her father beat her brothers and shaved their heads as punishment. He did not
believe in higher education for girls and Royal had to fight to go to
university.
When she was 18 she worked as an au pair in Dublin. The following year she
took her father to court. He had left her mother but refused to pay alimony.
