WE were gliding through the countryside last Thursday
afternoon in a silver Renault. The Socialist party was about to
pick her as its presidential candidate but Ségolène Royal, the
first woman with a real chance of conquering the Elysée Palace,
seemed remarkably relaxed. “Look at those beautiful colours,”
she said as we sped through a forest of red and gold.
Her campaign to win the nomination was over, but an even more
gruelling one for the presidency was about to begin. Royal’s
strategy in that battle is simple. “I’m just going to be
myself,” she said in an interview in the back of her car on
the way to a ceremony where she was presenting an award.
Just being Royal has worked well for her so far. Her
convincing victory over two Socialist rivals in a vote by party
members on Thursday night amounted to a revolution in the
male-dominated French political world whose leaders had been
dismissive of the 53-year-old mother of four.
Winning the presidency, she predicted, will be that much more
of an earthquake. “It will be a shock for France,” she said,
pausing to apply some lip gloss. “It will be incredible, an
almost global event.”
Polls give the photogenic former environment and family
minister under the Socialist President François Mitterrand an
even chance of defeating Nicolas Sarkozy, 51, the most likely
contender for the centre-right, in next year’s election.
Royal, the companion of François Hollande, secretary-general
of the Socialist party (some are calling him “Mr Royal”), is
confident that she can do it, dismissing as sour grapes and
“machismo” the criticisms of male politicians who have
argued that she is an incompetent upstart. “For men who have
spent all of their life engaged in the conquest of power,”
said Royal, “seeing a woman overtaking them is viscerally
unbearable.”
Whoever wins will face a particularly daunting dilemma: how
to revive the world’s sixth largest economy and restore
optimism to a country going through a crippling bout of
self-loathing.
Signs of the malaise are everywhere, from the welter of
doom-laden titles in bookshops to the political protests and
riots that set ablaze the immigrant suburbs last year in the
worst street violence for four decades.
The all-powerful state that once seemed to serve France well
under the so-called dirigiste model has become bloated and
inefficient.
Unemployment is stubbornly high and growth is sluggish —
French GDP has been surpassed by Britain’s. France has lost
its footing in so many domains that it once dominated, from
diplomacy to cooking, that people are growing dispirited and
restless.
Many French people fear that despite its nuclear weapons,
seat on the United Nations security council and privileged place
at the bosom of Europe, the country risks becoming irrelevant, a
depressing prospect for a proud people with a deep- rooted
attachment to the concept of national glory.
Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, likes to present
himself as the candidate of renewal and “rupture” with the
past even though, as interior minister and deputy prime
minister, he has long been a key member of one of the most
unpopular governing teams in the history of the fifth republic.
Royal will exploit that chink in his armour. “Everybody
knows that I am the incarnation of rupture, not him,” she
said. “I don’t have to talk about it for people to know
that.”
The truth, however, is that both of them represent change:
Royal with her designer wardrobe, freshness and plain manner of
speaking, Sarkozy with his glitzy American-style political
campaigning. The question is: which of them will be courageous
enough to implement it? Sarkozy has promised an overhaul of
France’s “social model” but made clear his protectionist
instincts when finance minister by flying to the defence of
French companies threatened by foreign takeovers.
He has preached a sort of compassionate conservatism à la
française by promising workers both benefits and protection
from globalisation. He would probably try to do away with the
35-hour week on the grounds that it risks turning France, in the
words of a previous prime minister, into a “holiday camp”.
Even if Sarkozy were intent on weaning France off its lavish
and expensive welfare system, the country’s tradition of angry
and sometimes violent protest — some say it dates from the
revolution — is conspiring against him. The recent failure of
Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, to bring in even the
slightest change to employment law was a graphic demonstration
of how difficult it is for French governments to get reforms
past the barricades and chants of the protesters.
Royal has remained vague on economic policy but has spoken
with fervour about the horrors of outsourcing jobs abroad. When
I joined her on Thursday in the town of St-Savin, 25 miles east
of Poitiers, she had just emerged from a meeting with the
employees of Aubade, the lingerie company, whose new Swiss
owners want to move the production line to Morocco where the
bras and knickers can be made a lot cheaper.
She would be in favour of making companies that relocate
reimburse any aid they have received from the state as a way of
discouraging them from taking jobs out of the country. Sarkozy
advocates the development of alternative employment and
retraining for people who lose their jobs to competition from
abroad.
There are fewer differences between Sarkozy and Royal,
perhaps, when it comes to social issues although both would no
doubt be reluctant to acknowledge it. The interior minister
tends to frighten people with angry rhetoric about the
“yobs” he holds responsible for attacks on police in the
immigrant suburbs. Royal frightens her party with talk about the
need for unruly teenagers to be sent to boot camp.
She says parents of children who run amok should be sent to
“parent school” and provoked howls of outrage when she
suggested that teachers should work a full 35-hour week instead
of moonlighting as private tutors.
What really sets her apart from other French politicians,
however, is her advocacy of more open government, a concept that
is clearly worrying a cosy political elite not used to sharing
its often dirty secrets with a compliant press and public.
She has applied this idea in Poitou-Charentes, where the
deliberations of the local assembly have been open to the public
since she won the presidency of the region in 2004.
In those days they called her La Zapatera because her
surprise electoral triumph followed that of Jose Luis Rodriguez
Zapatero, the reformist prime minister of Spain. Her critics
these days have changed the nickname to Zapaterreur. One of them
accused her in the assembly on Monday of being a “demagogue”
after he was booed and she was loudly applauded by
schoolchildren who were listening and learning about democracy.
“I had to take things in hand,” she said, referring to
the way she shook up her region by cancelling long-standing
subsidies to causes that she thought were not justified,
although they were backed by pillars of the community. In French
politics this qualifies as revolutionary. Royal said that people
would expect her to engage in a similar spring cleaning at the
national level.
No full account is ever given, for example, of how the
presidential budget, which has increased nine-fold under Jacques
Chirac, is spent. The extraordinary pomp of an institution that
employs hundreds of people to run palaces, country retreats and
hunting lodges is likely to be reduced if Royal becomes
president.
“I want more simplicity, more sobriety,” she said.
“That does not necessarily mean less stature or authority. I
think we can do things with simplicity and sobriety and have
just as much presence, embodying just as much the idea of the
nation. That is what people are expecting.”
Besides challenging the ways it used to spend money, Royal
has also made of her region an environmental showcase.
Poitou-Charentes is undoubtedly the greenest place in France,
even if the forest around it is wearing an autumnal hue. They
use bio-degradable plastic bags and talk earnestly in the cafes
of Poitiers about renewable sources of energy. On Thursday
morning Royal laid the foundation stone of the “Kyoto
college”, a building so environmentally friendly that its
waste will be turned into fuel.
Royal said she would make the environment a “pillar” of
her campaign against Sarkozy. For the moment it is not known
what his policy is on the degradation of the aquatic environment
by a foreign species of bullfrog but he had better get one soon.
Even the Green party seems to be lagging in competition with
Royal.
Sarkozy, who likes to dismiss Royal as a lightweight, will
have his work cut out. On top of Royal’s meteoric eruption
onto the political scene, he also has his own dysfunctional
political family to deal with.
Just as the Socialist party barons tried to trip up Royal,
figures in Chirac’s Gaullist Union for a Popular Movement have
been desperately trying to sabotage Sarkozy, even though he is
the president of their party, as part of a bitter and
long-running feud between him and the president.
The public has clearly had enough of internecine political
wars and disenchantment with the ruling class has never been
more palpable. That is where Royal comes in.
She is not like any of the other politicians. “I think a
lot of my popularity is because people feel that with me it
(politics) is not an obsession,” she said.
The same could not be said of Sarkozy, who appears to have
dreamt of being president since childhood. Whereas he has been
happy to use his family as a political prop, even wheeling out
his children for the cameras when needed, Royal has limits and
is fiercely protective of her and her children’s privacy.
“It is going to be hard for them,” she said. “There
will be a lot of media harassment. I will have to make a
statement asking people to leave them alone.”
In every other respect, however, she is relishing the combat
to come while resisting the temptation of pencilling in names
for government ministries before she is elected.
“It will depend on competence,” she insisted, when asked
whether she could bring herself to forgive and welcome into her
government insulting rivals such as Laurent Fabius, the former
prime minister. He has been forced to deny that, on hearing that
Royal was going to run as a candidate, he asked: “Who will
look after the children?”
In a way she has already helped to put France back on the map
and marvels at her international celebrity status. “The other
day,” she said, with a giggle, “all these Chinese people
came up to me in Poitiers station. They wanted my autograph. It
is incredible. They had seen me on television in Beijing.”
