HAVING tried everything else in her quest to stop the seemingly inexorable
march of Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative candidate, Ségolène Royal played
what she hoped was her trump card in the last hours of the battle for the
French presidency: her femininity.
In a desperate attempt to woo undecided voters, Royal was reduced to
emphasising the novelty of having a woman in the Elysée Palace who was more
than just a first lady.
“I know there are those who thought – and who still think – is it really
reasonable to choose a woman?” she said in her final campaign rally in the
northern city of Lille on Thursday night. “Is France going to dare? I want
to say: dare. Dare! You won’t regret it.”
Some called it a gamble, worrying that Royal’s use of her gender might
transform her into a divisive “symbol of sexist revenge”, as Sylviane
Agacinski, the author and psychologist, put it.
There was not much danger of that, however. It emerged that Royal was being
let down at the ballot box not by centrists, Socialists or any other
political bloc but by the one sector of the electorate that might have been
expected to rally to her cause in droves: women.
She may have been misled by an Elle magazine opinion poll in January that
suggested France was a haven of sisterly solidarity and put her comfortably
ahead among women. This seemed to vindicate her approach of appealing for
votes not as a woman but as the best-qualified candidate to replace
President Jacques Chirac.
Things began to change last month, however, when other polls showed that women
were falling under the spell of the diminutive Sarkozy, even if Cécilia, his
errant wife, was rumoured to have abandoned him once more.
Royal changed tack, launching direct appeals to women voters, but by then it
was too late: in the first round of voting on April 22, more women voted for
him (32%) than for her (28%). So much for what the pundits had been calling
the “gender effect”.
In a series of campaign appearances last week, she intensified her appeals to
women, invoking the memory of Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of
the Rights of Women, who was sent to the guillotine in 1793.
Royal appealed to “all those women who have trouble making ends meet at the
end of the month, saleswomen, cashiers, auxiliary nurses, cleaners”.
The problem, however, was not how to win more support among working women:
they were already more inclined to vote for Royal than for Sarkozy. It was
their mothers’ generation, the over65s, who were giving her the cold
shoulder – 43% of them voted for Sarkozy.
As Mariette Sineau, a political analyst, put it: “This age group of women
tends to associate masculinity with power.”
Janine Mossuz-Lavau, of the National Scientific Research Centre, was even more
explicit: “The aged, conservative, Catholic population that grew up in a
system where women did not have political responsibilities might have been
very sensitive to macho comments such as, ‘Who is going to look after the
children?’ ” This was a reference to a jibe by Laurent Fabius, a former
Socialist prime minister and one of Royal’s two rivals in the party’s
leadership contest: such comments were common among her male, Socialist
rivals at the start of the campaign.
More surprising, however, was how bitchy women were prepared to be about
Royal. Michèle Alliot-Marie, the conservative defence minister known for her
taste in trouser suits, said recently: “We do not want a president who
changes her ideas as often as she changes her skirts.” She later summed up
Royal’s performance in the televised duel with Sarkozy on Wednesday by
saying: “Being vague is fine for fashion, not for politics.”
It was not just women on the right who felt tempted to put the boot in.
Feminists who might have been expected to applaud the first woman with a
real chance of becoming president sniffed at what they saw as her
prudishness.
“This country doesn’t need a mummy to give it moral lectures,” said Catherine
Millet, controversial author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
Clémentine Autain, communist founder of the Mix-Cité feminist group, sounded
more afraid of the “puritan” Socialist candidate than she did of the “macho
man Sarko”.
“Her praise of motherhood, her old-fashioned speeches about the family, her
way of saying she does politics differently because she is a woman, her
fight against pornography – these are not at all my cup of tea,” said
Autain.
No man would have dared to make the sort of antiRoyal comments that were
tripping off the tongues of women each day.
“Her ‘I’m beautiful, look at me, I’ve got four children’ might impress a
supermarket check-out girl but we don’t use that card,” said Nadine Morano,
an MP from Sarkozy’s UMP conservative party.
However, one French woman politician was prepared to stand up for her.
“Attacks on women are always about their person, never about their policies
or their actions,” said Edith Cresson, the country’s first woman prime
minister. “It was true in the Eighties and it’s still true today.”
That did not silence Royal’s women critics. She may have won the backing of
actress Emmanuelle Béart, who turned up at her rallies, but the pundits were
sharpening their knives.
According to Marie-France Etchegoin, a commentator in the Nouvel Observateur,
Royal went from “conquering supermum” who had raised four children and held
down a remarkable career to an incompetent and vacuous “Emma Bovary of
politics”.
Royal’s inability to rally women to her banner was not the only failure. One
of her allies was temporarily suspended from the team for identifying
François Hollande, the Socialist party’s secretary-general and father of her
children, as her “biggest defect”. For a while he had given the impression
of believing he, not she, was the candidate, apparently bitter about seeing
his own presidential ambitions trampled on by his common-law spouse of the
past three decades.
He repeatedly contradicted her, on one occasion even announcing tax rises, to
the horror of the candidate, in the event of a Socialist victory.
Sarkozy also swooped on Hollande as the weakest Royal link in his debate with
her on Wednesday when he reminded more than 20m television viewers that the
partner of the Socialist candidate had once said: “I don’t like the rich.”
Other “elephants”, as the Socialist party’s leaders are known, were no more
helpful, voicing support for their champion with the sort of enthusiasm that
evoked vultures circling their prey in the desert.
She was dogged from the beginning by questions of competence, often
complaining: “A man would never have to undergo the trial of legitimacy to
which I have been subjected.”
Sometimes, it seemed, the accusations were justified, as when, in China, which
regularly executes prisoners with a bullet in the back of the head, she
praised the justice system for being “quicker” than that in France. On
another occasion, she referred to the “Taliban regime” in Afghanistan. The
Taliban lost power in 2001.
There was also the question of amateurism. Royal had a habit of cancelling
engagements at the last minute, dispatching underlings to address provincial
audiences that had been patiently waiting for a glimpse of the Socialist
Madonna.
Even her own electors in the first round, it turned out, doubted her
suitability for the presidency. According to an opinion poll, only 16% of
the people who voted for her felt that she had the “stature” of a president.
At the outset, the presence of a female candidate in the race had appeared to
herald a new era in politics, a fresh start. The television debate on
Wednesday, however, made clear that this was a choice between a man and a
woman, no matter how much the candidates tried to blur the distinction.
Royal went on the offensive and the normally combative Sarkozy, who did not
want to be the “macho man Sarko” of feminist lore, meekly took her punches.
Sarkozy was more convincing on “male” topics, such as the economy and foreign
affairs. Royal seemed stronger when talking about the environment, education
and handicapped children.
So it seemed as if the French were ready for a woman in high office in their
minds but not, as the final decision drew near, in reality.
As one commentator put it after the debate: “She basically showed she would
make a formidable leader of the opposition.”
