All French style over substance? Segolene Royal's stiletto revolution could transform French politics, but does her rise signal the spread of inward-looking populism, asks Emma-Kate Symons -------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 20, 2006
ENORMOUS black and red stilettos adorn a comely pair of legs. Two miniature men in suits grimace and gesticulate, as one armed with an axe tries in vain to hack into the formidable heels towering over them. This is how Liberation, the left-wing daily co-founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, depicted the "Royal revolution" on its front page on Friday when Segolene Royal took an elegant leap towards becoming France's first woman president.
Royal, a former junior minister who is president of the western region of Poitou-Charentes, easily won the Socialist Party nomination after a gruelling primary campaign characterised by dirty tricks and what she described as the "male chauvinism" of the "elephants" in her party.
Eighty-four per cent of the party faithful participated in the unprecedented US-style primary, after six debates between the three final candidates. Royal humiliated her two older male rivals, Laurent Fabius, a former prime minister, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a former finance minister, by attracting more than 60 per cent of rank-and-file support.
"C'est Elle!", "It's Her!" the tabloid Aujourd'hui effused after Royal was anointed Socialist candidate. The absence even of her nickname, Sego, in the headline left no confusion, because there is only one "Elle" in French politics today. Steeped in notions of femininity and sexual difference, France only gave the vote to women in 1945. It has one of Western Europe's lowest levels of female representation. But by May next year, France could have a woman, and an intelligent and beautiful woman who looks great in a bikini, in the Elysee Palace.
However, her path is littered with dangers. On the hustings, Royal endured constant sniping about her looks ("this is not a beauty contest"); attacks on her triple status as politician, mother and member of France's leading power couple ("who will look after the children?"); and leaked details about her colourful family, including a brother who helped blow up the Rainbow Warrior.
A mother of four, whose partner is the first secretary of the Socialist Party, Francois Hollande, Royal used a media-savvy internet-driven campaign characterised by a populist focus on crime and security. Her approach combined social and economic conservatism with socially progressive policies and hints of a "third way" for the French Left.
Borrowing liberally from the Left and Right, she proposed boot camp for delinquents from the troubled French suburbs, supported gay marriage, criticised the work ethic of school teachers and called for citizen panels to judge the performance of politicians.
But Royal stumbled badly later in her campaign. Confusion between nuclear energy and nuclear proliferation in Iran, and a refusal to comment on key European matters such as Turkey's entrance into Europe, prompted scorn.
"From afar she seduces but up close she disappoints," warned former French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin yesterday.
Royal's likely foe in next year's elections, Interior Minister and the centre-right frontrunner Nicolas Sarkozy, joked last week that Royal's bungling helped his campaign. She was "irascible and quite hard", he said.
Speaking after her primary win, Royal appeared to recognise the apprehension surrounding her nomination when she promised the French people that: "You will not be disappointed." Yet elements of former Labor leader Mark Latham's failed pitch for the prime ministership are evident in her rapid rise.
Relatively inexperienced at a ministerial level and lacking gravitas on international and economic matters, critics consider her a lightweight. She has seized the nomination thanks to her gender and good looks, relative youth, media adoration and calculated populism, the cynics say.
So what does Royal, a die-hard product of the elite French system of political education, really stand for? And is she, much like Latham, an opposition candidate whose soaring popularity is built on media hype and clever image management, including celebrity endorsements such as those from actor Carole Bouquet and suburban girlpower rapper Diam?
Born in Senegal to a French colonel, she was educated at the elite political finishing school Ecole Nationale d'Administration and has served as environment and family minister.
Despite her public repudiation of her authoritarian father, she has a rigid cast of personality with a turn of phrase that mixes military metaphors with the slogans of participatory democracy.
Her foes on the Left, including Fabius, seized on Royal's complimentary remarks about British Prime Minister Tony Blair, spreading fear that she would impose "ultra-liberal" Blairist economic reforms in France, a nation still enamoured of economic protectionism and a strong welfare state.
Emmanuel Todd, historian and demographer, dismisses Royal and Sarkozy as "empty candidates", reserving particular scorn for Royal, who "could make the Left lose because she has a discourse that is very much to the Right. She is not a Socialist any more."
Royal faces a formidable challenge in uniting the fragmented French Left. Even if she manages to keep the Socialists on message, anti-globalisation forces, from the Communist, Trotskyist, Green and assorted figures such as Jose Bove of the farmers' union, are already marshalling to derail her campaign. The fear of mainstream socialists is that her pitch for the presidency will be ruined as Lionel Jospin's was in 2002 by a Left in disarray, giving way to the extreme Right incarnated by the wily Jean-Marie Le Pen.
But Royal is in economic terms a traditional socialist and she has no plans for wholesale reform. Her answer to France's persistently high unemployment, zero economic growth and fear of globalisation is to fine companies that move operations outside France to avoid its heavily regulated labour market. She raised questions about the merits of the 35-hour week, but only because the law forced workers to make concessions to employers.
Like Sarkozy, Royal wants to win the votes of lower-middle-class French people living in the suburbs and regional centres where concern runs high about violence and vandalism perpetrated by unemployed youth.
Still, her tough-on-crime approach has failed to stem the surge in support for France's veteran far right demagogue Le Pen, who has toned down his anti-Semitism in a pitch for the votes of all "victims" of the status quo, from immigrants, to women, farmers, royalists and opponents of "Islamicisation". Polls show the 78-year-old Holocaust-denier with at least 15 per cent support. His popularity has increased in the wake of a flare-up of violence in the troubled suburbs, highlighted by the shocking spate of bus burnings that left a 26-year-old French-Senegalese woman with burns to 70 per cent of her body in Marseilles.
All the cards remain on the table, including a repeat of the 2002 presidential election when Le Pen beat Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin in the first round, leading to a run-off with Chirac.
Le Pen has been crowing for more than a week since his triumphant National Front congress outside Paris. On a march to protect farmers around Carpentras in his southern stronghold of Vaucluse, he boasted: "The polls currently are double what they were at the same moment in 2001 (before he beat Jospin in the first round). I don't know who I will be against in the second round".
After Royal's win in the Socialist primary, he was jubilant.
"It is a victory of the 'Royalists', which I salute, but it will not change things greatly," Le Pen said. "Madame Royal cannot carry out something new in a Socialist Party structure which constrains her to respect the choice of the party. She will try to evade it, but the weight of the party is such that it will impose its will on her".