A YEAR ago she was a mocked by senior colleagues as a joke. Yesterday Ségolène Royal savoured her coronation as the glamorous new face of French socialism and household name for the global media.
Friends say that they never doubted that Marie-Ségolène Royal, the independent-minded daughter of a disciplinarian army officer, would aim for the top. Few, however, foresaw the speed with which she would seize control of the tradition-bound Socialist party.
Ms Royal’s overwhelming victory in Thursday’s vote by party members has made history by putting a woman within reach of the French presidency, a monarchical, patriarchal institution that was tailormade for Charles de Gaulle in the late 1950s.
That was only a decade after French women were given the vote. French presidents are supposed to be elderly statesmen good at grandeur, not youngish-looking women with television charisma but little clear ideology.
Ms Royal’s success has put a spanner in the old party machine created by the late President Mitterrand, her mentor. It has also vindicated her belief that France has become more like the United States and is ready to embrace a candidate who appeals with personality and imagination rather than with doctrines and decades in high office.
By staying vague on policy and hammering themes of trust, fairness and order, the one-time junior minister for the family and schools won over the Socialists and enchanted much of France. She did it thanks to a homemade, but very effective, campaign over the heads of the party barons, who deemed her to be out of her depth and unqualified for the Elysée Palace.
Part of her campaign was a make-over. The mother of four abandoned a dowdy, bespectacled look for a sleeker silhouette. Her outfits in cream or pale tones contrast with the dark suits of her male rivals. She was also enhanced by surgery last March, which changed the line of her jaw.
The old guard woke up too late to the grit of a woman whom they had underestimated, even after she won the presidency of the Poitou-Charentes region, a conservative bastion, in 2004. They had not been paying attention a few years ago when Ms Royal, explained her burning drive to succeed. “In my family the destiny of the girls was to get married and devote themselves to the home,” she said of her unhappy childhood among seven siblings. “To escape, I had no alternative but to win, through my school marks, the right to go a bit further at every stage.”
Ms Royal’s critics — in her own camp as well as the centre-right opposition — are wondering how she will flesh out the lyrical vision of renaissance that she offered France yesterday. She has yet to give a hint of how she would achieve her pledge to rebuild the protective welfare state and shield France from globalisation while creating the prosperity to pay for it. She has said that she wants to “make the capitalists suffer” but also encourage business. Yesterday she said only: “It is by remaining ourselves that we shall be able to resist the ill winds of outlaw liberalism.”
According to Arnaud Montebourg, one of Ms Royal’s closest lieutenants, she is not denying the reality of world economics but achieving a new alchemy for a “post-globalised world which begins when oil supplies end”.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the pugilistic champion of the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement, has been eclipsed by the Ségomania but he will seek to puncture her telegenic spell as the campaign gets under way for the April elections. The Interior Minister has also cast himself as a reforming outsider and plays to France’s fear of globalisation. But, unlike Ms Royal, he accepts the need for harsh medicine.
And unlike Ms Royal and most French politicians he embraces the label “liberal”, which in France means favouring free trade and deregulation.
For the moment, though, Ms Royal has a head start to build on a deft, unorthodox campaign that has infuriated the elephants, as the big beasts of the party are known.
The headline on France2 television said it all yesterday after Ms Royal trounced Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius in the Socialist primary: “The gazelle has killed the elephants.” Some of the old guard continued to murmur that Ms Royal would lead them to disaster, but most agreed that she had earned legitimacy as a potential head of state.
Although not quite an elephant, Ms Royal’s most uncomfortable colleague is probably François Hollande, the party chief, who is her partner and father of their four children. Mr Hollande wanted the candidacy originally and did not encourage his partner’s ambitions. “I will not divulge my emotions,” he said yesterday after a formal congratulation speech. Ms Royal, a self-proclaimed feminist from an ultra-Catholic family, has rejected suggestions that she marry her partner of 28 years.
Ms Royal earned the gazelle label a year ago when she emerged from her recently won presidency of the western Poitou-Charentes region to make her bid.
As party rivals mocked her as a lightweight and a mere woman, she went into action with a makeshift team that included her 21-year-old son. She tapped into the frustration over France’s governing caste and used television, the internet and constant travels to win attention over the heads of the party. Her guerrilla tactics were unheard of in the hierarchical Socialist party.
Though she is a party outsider, Ms Royal’s newcomer’s pose is hollow since she hails from the heart of the elite as a graduate of the elite École Nationale de l’Administration, adviser to President Mitterrand in the 1980s, former minister and MP since 1988. However, she has used fresh language to convince people that she is a working mother who is in tune with their concerns.
She shocked the guardians of left-wing orthodoxy by campaigning for old-fashioned — Blairite — values of discipline, respect and responsibility. Her main slogan is simple and vague: “For a just Republic”.
Mr Sarkozy, who is certain to be anointed as UMP candidate in January, says that he relishes the forthcoming “Ségo-Sarko” duel because Ms Royal is weak on policy. Mr Sarkozy’s aides concede privately, however, that “the lady in white” will be a formidable opponent.
WOMAN IN WHITE
Quotable quotes: “Being a woman is not enough to be different.” “Democracy is like love. The more you get of it, the bigger it grows.” “People are interested in politics when politics is interested in people”
