A YEAR ago few in France would have believed the scene that was playing out last night in Vitrolles, a dormitory suburb of Marseilles. A youthful woman in her early 50s was appearing in the town hall to announce her bid for the presidency, and half the country believes that she will win.
“Here, amid party militants and the French, I answer the question with simplicity . . . conscious of the weight of my words and the importance of the act,” she intoned. “Yes, I accept this mission to conquer for France.”
The rise of Ségolène Royal from dowdy minor politician to glamorous darling of the opinion polls has come as a shock to a political world dominated since the 1970s by the same elderly men with the same old ideas.
The withdrawal on Wednesday of Lionel Jospin, the 69-year-old Socialist warhorse, who tried to block his junior colleague, means that the election next April is likely to end with a duel between champions of renewal: Mme Royal, 53, and Nicolas Sarkozy, 51, the leader of the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP).
“Sarko”, President Chirac’s Deputy Prime Minister and a Cabinet star since his 30s, is a well-known quantity. The opposite applies to “Ségo”, as the president of the Poitou-Charentes region and former junior minister is affectionately known.
She has waged an inspired single-handed campaign that has saturated the media with her image as an attractive sympathique superwoman. As well as admiring her looks and made-over style — including holiday shots of her in a bikini — France has warmed to her sterner side and her Blair-style rhetoric of values and “respect”. Yet Mme Royal remains a mystery. She is also a source of anxiety inside her own party, which has yet to endorse her and which, to complicate matters, is led by François Hollande, her partner and father of her four children. “The French love Ségolène,” Alain Duhamel, a veteran political commentator, said yesterday. “She is popular and fashionable but they do not know her . . . There is a gigantic question mark over her.”
In the next few weeks Mme Royal’s coming-out, as a woman as well as a political thinker, will take place. Details of her closely guarded private life have begun to trickle out. Le Parisien reported yesterday on difficulties with M Hollande, who it said was suffering depression over the way that his partner has sidelined him with her fierce ambition to reach the Elysée Palace.
Antoine Royal, one of her seven siblings, also went public about their troubled childhood with a tyrannical father, an army colonel who beat his children and regarded his daughters as inferior beings. As a teenager Mme Royal led her siblings in rebellion against their father and encouraged her mother to sue him for financial support after their separation. “My sister makes no concessions,” M Royal said. “She is someone who keeps her word, who has lived through injustice.” Pierre Royal, her uncle, accused her in le Parisien of rewriting family history in her favour. “I reproach her for publicly damaging the image of her father by depicting him as a dictator,” he said.
Antoine Royal also revealed yesterday that Gérard, another brother, was the secret service agent who attached the bomb to the hull of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior. The vessel was blown up on French Government orders in Auckland harbour in 1985, killing a crew member and embarrassing the late President Mitterrand. It was known that M Royal had been part of the operation, but not that he played the central role. Mme Royal was an adviser to M Mitterrand at the time.
Mme Royal’s supporters hope that she will now build on her image as left-wing moderniser, superwoman and moral traditionalist who is in tune with the people. Her opponents hope that her media bubble will burst and that she will come unstuck, revealing a mean streak and lack of ideas. M Sarkozy’s attack line was summed up yesterday by Patrick Devedjian, a senior MP on his campaign team: “The campaign will prove that Ségolène does not have (leadership) qualities. The people of the Poitou-Charentes who have experienced her authoritarian and divisive management style have found this out.”
Mme Royal’s mixed performance in her two years as the first woman elected to run a region is a weak point. She has put many backs up with harsh methods that have earned her the local nickname of Egolène.
Her immediate task is to defeat the three rivals for the nomination, which is to be decided in a vote by the party’s 200,000 members on November 16.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 57, a former Finance Minister, Jack Lang, 67, a former Culture and Education Minister, and Laurent Fabius, 60, the former Prime Minister, believe that they are more legitimate figures to restore a Socialist presidency. The three come nowhere near Mme Royal in polls of left-wing voters, but a section of the party membership shares the view of her as a lightweight who will lead the Left to defeat. Worst of all, they suspect her of being a “social liberal” — the term that covers what France also calls “le Blairisme”.
Mme Royal has lately toned down her admiration of the British Prime Minister, who is regarded by orthodox French socialists as a traitor to the cause. But she has drawn left-wing suspicion with her only clear policy ideas so far: she wants the military to discipline unruly teenagers and wants to dismantle further the 35-hour maximum working week that was the flagship law of the Government of M Jospin.
M Jospin is continuing to campaign against Mme Royal. He and other party elders believe that her unorthodox ideas will alienate voters just when a majority of the country wants to swing back to the Left. Announcing his candidature formally yesterday, M Strauss-Kahn said: “I am convinced that first the Socialists and later the French at large will realise that I am the best rampart against the policies of the Right.” There is no evidence so far, however, that Mme Royal aims to stray from the Socialists’ traditional doctrines of high welfare spending and close state supervision of the economy.
Senior party figures are rallying in greater number to the Royal cause and it seems unlikely that the rank and file will reject the biggest star that their party has produced since Mitterrand.
“Ségolène Royal is absolutely the only one capable of beating Nicolas Sarkozy and the Right,” Jean-François Kahn, the editor of Marianne, a left-wing news weekly, said yesterday.
Some old associates of Mme Royal are not certain that she has the stamina or the stature for the marathon to the ultimate prize. Under the system created in 1958 for Charles de Gaulle, winning the most powerful executive post in the Western world requires what the late general called “a dialogue between a man and the people”. Some colleagues who have known Mme Royal since she studied at the École Nationale de l’ Administration, the training school of the civil service elite, where she met her partner, say they are amazed that she has suddenly emerged as a potential head of state. “We all thought François (Hollande) would be the politician. We didn’t take Ségolène very seriously,” said a colleague who was a classmate of Mme Royal and M Hollande.
M Jospin shares the view of Mme Royal as a lightweight who deserves promotion no higher than the junior post of schools and family affairs minister, to which he appointed her in the late 1990s. In a remark typical of the patronising tone adopted by the Socialist barons, M Jospin described her last month as a “conduit with no content”. Others close to Mme Royal say that she has long harboured a fierce ambition to reach the top and that she had the presidency in her sights since she began running in 2003 for the Poitou-Charentes region. She has been a member of parliament from there since 1988.
After establishing her regional fiefdom she launched a brilliant campaign to bypass her colleagues and project her image as an alternative to the middle-aged barons of the Left. Through an interactive internet site, foreign travels and a refusal to debate policy, she has maintained her image as an outsider who appeals across party lines. She has also used her femininity against the macho political world, casting herself as a working mother with sensible modern ideas.
The formula has kept her neck-and-neck with M Sarkozy in the opinion polls for months. She has hit only the occasional bump, notably this month when she lost her temper with a young Socialist woman who needled her with a mildly provocative question.
The real pressure on Mme Royal will start if she wins the party nomination in November and is forced to divulge her thinking on divisive issues such as taxation, immigration and Europe. Since 1995 voters have rebelled consistently against the establishment consensus, defying polls and media forecasts. As media favourites Mme Royal and M Sarkozy will be vulnerable to this mood of rejection.
THE CONTEST
September 30 - October 3
Socialist Party candidates register
November 16
Voting for Socialist Party candidate
December
Candidates of the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement register
April 22, 2007
Probable date for first round of presidential elections
May 6
Probable date for second round of voting, if required
