THE French taboo over politicians’ private lives crumbled further yesterday with the publication of photographs of Ségolène Royal, the left-wing favourite to succeed President Chirac next spring, on the beach in her bikini.

Mme Royal, who is 53 next month and favourite to win the Socialist nomination in the autumn, is unlikely to suffer from the flattering first pictures to be published of a female politician in minimal attire.

“She looks like a star on holiday,” said Le Parisien, in a gushing report on what it called a “sulphurous” breach of privacy.

The images are likely to infuriate the party barons who see Mme Royal as a lightweight and are desperate to halt her rise as the likely left-wing champion against Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister and centre-right contender.

Closer, one of a new breed of brash celebrity magazines, presented a two-page spread of Mme Royal swimming and on a Mediterranean beach. She has a holiday home at nearby Mougins, near Cannes, which belongs to the mother of François Hollande, the party leader who is her partner and the father of their four children. M Hollande’s balding head appears in one shot. “Who would guess that this willowy woman is 53 and has four children?” said Closer.

Laurence Pieau, the magazine’s editor, said that she expected to be sued for breach of the press privacy law — a procedure that is almost routine when a celebrity is snapped with a long lens.

But politicians have lately avoided that course as they have increasingly promoted their families as electoral assets. M Sarkozy, 51, has not been averse to shots of himself on the beach, but he drew the line when Paris Match published last year a picture of his wife and her lover at the time. That cost Alain Genestar, Paris Match’s Editor, his job after M Sarkozy vented his wrath to Arnaud Lagardère, whose family owns the magazine.

M Sarkozy is suing a Swiss paper that reported his own alleged extramarital activities.

The physique of Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister and rival to M Sarkozy, was widely admired when he was photographed emerging from a dip in the Atlantic last year.

Despite the disapproval of her entourage, there was suspicion that Mme Royal may have been complicit in the pictures. Gael Polles, a presenter on TF1, said the pictures could be “false paparazzi shots” designed to boost her popularity. Last June Frenchmen rated her the sixth-sexiest woman in the world in a poll for FHM. The trend away from privacy “attests to the fascination of French politicians for American-style politics”, said M Polles.

Renaud Revel, the author of a book on “la people”, as celebrity culture is known in French, said that politicians of the younger generation were deliberately exposing their private lives. “We would never have seen this 20 years ago. All the barriers of our old French modesty are being shattered.”

Mme Royal has won the hearts of much of France, but she has yet to win over the hardline Socialist activists who suspect that she is a female version of Tony Blair.

Read Charles Bremner’s weblog

Poll snapshot
If first round of presidential elections were held today, how would you vote?
Sarkozy ...............35%
Royal....................32%
Favoured socialist candidate
(among left-wing voters)
Royal....................32%
Jospin...................21%
Hollande...............19%
Source:Tns-Sofres/Le Figaro, July 17

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