Tomorrow France heads to the polls for the first round of the presidential elections. No candidate has divided opinion as much as Ségolène Royal, a telegenic mother-of-four who could bring the Socialists back to power. But is there any substance behind her style?
By Janine di Giovanni
Paris, February 5, 2007: 7pm
On a cold winter night I catch a taxi to the edge of the 13th Arrondissement in Paris. The taxi driver is grumpy. He moans about the traffic. The journey takes 45 minutes, but when we reach our destination, there’s a huge crowd and the driver suddenly smiles. “Ah, Ségolène!” he says. “Maman Ségo!” I am here, along with 7,000 others, to see Ségolène Royal’s first Paris election rally. It takes nearly an hour to reach the door of the Halle Georges Carpentier, and I am sandwiched between hard-core political activists, pensioners, young people, mothers carrying babies. I eavesdrop. I expect talk of rising taxes, the environment, unemployment. But no. A young mother to a friend: “I wonder if she’ll wear white again tonight?” A white jacket – often by designer Paule Ka – is Ségolène Royal’s trademark.
This is not the Paris of postcard lovers kissing on the Pont Neuf. This is grimy Paris – ugly high-rise buildings crowded with immigrant families. So it’s the right place for the colonel’s daughter, graduate of the École National d’Administration (alma mater of top politicians and civil servants), former junior minister under Mitterand, and president of the Poitou-Charentes region of Western France, to play the socialist card. In France, there has never been an equivalent of the Blair revolution, and the left still really are the left. So Royal criticises banks, globalisation – anyone who makes money. Meanwhile, the crowd goes wild. “Ségolène, Présidente!” screeches a Tahitian man beating his chest. A teenager wears a T-shirt bearing the word “SEGOSPHERE”, name of the youth website partly run by Ségolène’s son, Thomas.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the brilliant former Finance Minister is here, in the front row. But absent is Lionel Jospin, the former Socialist prime minister. Strauss-Kahn and Jospin are some of the so-called “elephants”, the political old guard who mocked the lovely Ségo when she wrestled the Socialist Party nomination from their very hands last November. Now they have no choice but to give support. “A Gazelle among the Elephants” is how the French press put it. Then, suddenly, smiling her beatific smile, she is on stage. Maman Ségo. Mother of the nation. Joan of Arc, but prettier.
Three-piece suit, low heels, shiny hair. She raises her hand and the crowd goes quiet. I leave thinking that this is a woman who clearly knows how to push buttons. But I also keep thinking about what one of her colleagues at ENA once said: “Everyone thinks she is nice and not clever. But the truth is, she is very clever and absolutely not nice.”
February 19
So who is Ségolène Royal? She was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1953, the fourth of eight siblings and raised in an authoritarian Catholic household, which was austere even by the standards of Fifties colonial life. After rebelling against this upbringing, Ségolène rose through the ranks of the Socialist Party with her partner of 27 years, Francois Hollande, the son of a doctor, whom she met at ENA, and with whom she has four children. She has always refused to marry, because she felt that the institution betrayed her mother. But if anyone in Ségolène Royal’s own partnership has lost out, it is arguably Hollande, who became the leader of the Socialists, and might have been expected to run for president had Ségolène not eclipsed him. “I should have been the candidate,” he said in an interview. “But I thought, if Ségolène has more of a chance, I won’t stand in her way.” And indeed, last summer’s photographs of a tanned Ségolène in a bikini and a baseball hat seemed to seal her fate. The public was astounded by the taut abdominal muscles of a woman close to her 53rd birthday. In a sense, that was the end of her tubby husband’s chance of being front-runner.
After being elected president of Poitou-Charentes in 2004, Ségolène used her popularity with the electorate as a weapon with which to conquer the party.
She first hinted at a run for the presidency in Paris Match in 2005, and in the same year appeared on the cover of the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur with the words: “And if it was her?” That’s when Ségo mania started. In winning the nomination, she beat two of the “elephants” – former prime minister Laurent Fabius, alleged to have said, “But who will look after the children?”, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, alleged to have said that she spoke as if she was “reading from her recipe cards”. After winning, she appointed them as “strategic counsel”, partially appeasing them. But she also said, “Gazelles run faster than elephants.” Many people are disappointed that Hollande, a political animal who understands the party structure, is not running. He is clever, witty, and when he sinks his teeth into someone, he goes for it. But no one could imagine him as a candidate. It would be, says one political observer, “like putting a fat boy in a 100-metre race”.
In that sense, people do feel that Ségolène is a compromise – the only person the Socialists could lay their hands on who could be popular enough to stand a chance against the Conservative Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Ségolène’s big promise has been to listen to people – about the woeful economy, the troubled health service, and the need to reform the crippled welfare state. But her detractors say that when she comes to talk she is less impressive. She lacks substance, they say. Specifically, she is hazy on foreign policy and the economy. Her platform has, quite literally, been cobbled together from public opinion – including the two million-plus visitors to her website.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that some of her ideas seem disjointed. She has attacked the sacred 35-hour week, but also called for state financing of trade unions and a ¤250-a-month increase in the minimum wage. She says she wants to create more jobs for young people, but won’t promise a radical overhaul of the rigid job contracts that put employers off hiring. While mostly a social liberal, she has called for boot camps for young offenders.
Everyone I know insists they won’t vote for her, but the kids in the banlieue who registered in December and who want to keep out Sarkozy – who famously called them scum during the 2005 riots – are all voting for her.
And then there is François Bayrou, the centrist who has emerged from nowhere, it seems, and is taking votes from Ségolène.
Tonight, there is a pre-election debate show on TV in which 100 participants, chosen to represent France socially and demographically, fire questions at a candidate – in this case Ségolène. A series of recent gaffes have left her trailing Sarkozy in the ratings. But right now she is in her element. This is “participatory democracy” as she likes to call it. Most of the show is boring. Then one of the participants, 60-year-old Bernard Bontron, confined to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis, begins to speak. He describes how badly he and others are treated by the state – and he nearly breaks down. Suddenly, Ségolène leaves the podium, crosses the studio and touches his arm in sympathy. The crowd looks stunned. Did she do it out of maternal compassion – or does she simply have tremendous political nous? M Bontron looks shocked. The next day the press is glowing. Maman Ségolène.
The new Marianne. Bontron becomes a celebrity for 15 seconds, trying to explain why Ségo did it. “It is a reaction of a woman, a mother – it comforted me.” But, he pointed out rather heatedly, “I intend to vote for François Bayrou.”
Despite M Bontron’s intentions, Ségolène’s performance is judged a success by the French media. Devoted Ségolène observers say her campaign style has evolved over the past few months. When she is stuck behind a podium, she can be wooden and boring. But when she takes the microphone and moves into the crowd, she comes into her own. “Also, her body language is very Catholic,”
says one of her press pack. “She has a Madonna-like posture. That white jacket, and of course, her serene look, which evokes the illumination.”
Gare du Lyon, Paris, March 22: 2pm
I am on the TGV rushing to the South with Ségolène’s trusted press pack and advisers. We are bound for Marseilles, Aix, Correns, and finally Nice, where Ségolène is attending rallies, meeting people, shaking hands. She will also refuse to sing La Marseillaise. Or not refuse, but simply not do it.
But more about that later. The train is full of reporters, nearly all French, mostly besotted. I discuss her foreign policy – or lack of it – with a French TV guy. He looks appalled. “Not at all. It’s just that after Chirac’s brilliant foreign policy, how can you top that?” There seems to be an unspoken rule not to criticise Royal.
5.30pm
The Dome of Marseilles is filling up with the party faithful. I stand outside with two of the guards. They tell me how tough it has been in Marseilles with all of the strikes; how France needs a firm hand to guide it. “Ségolène?” They laugh nervously and stomp on their cigarettes. Inside, there are huge TV screens showing pictures of fluffy clouds, blue skies and laughing children. The Segosphere crowd is here again with its banners:
“Les jeunes pour Ségolène!” “Fier d’être socialiste!” One of their so-called leaders, Sidani, a 21-year-old, explains Ségolène’s appeal: “She is new, she incarnates change, she is different for France. Quite simply – it is her.”
The place is packed with 10,000 people. Photographers gather on stage. A young Muslim mother with a veil, holding a small child in a Ségolène T-shirt, appears to be the most photographed. In the crowd are two young doctors, both 29. Why do they support Ségolène? They shrug. “Because we’re the Left?” says the woman, uncertainly. And the man: “If Sarkozy gets in, he will create a police state.”
By now, the chanting crowd is singing Bella Ciao, an Italian anti-fascist song. Ségolène strides on stage. She has a dazzling smile – helped, foreign reporters say, by a good dentist. She’s wonderfully telegenic – there has been some catty speculation about plastic surgery. “This is an important historic moment...” she begins, which never bodes well for a speech. Ségo talks about how the Right – specifically Sarkozy – mocks “our participatory democracy”. The crowd hisses and boos at the mention of Sarkozy. “Mais non, non, non,” she says, scolding them, like a school marm. She calls for a “Sixth Republic”, talks about the youth doubting their future, then veers off on to the Developing World, mentioning Africa, Darfur, the millions who don’t have clean water.
The crowd starts to sing perhaps the most stirring anthem ever written, the anti-Royalist Marseillaise. Remember the great scene in Casablanca when the band strikes up in Rick’s Bar and people start singing and everyone cries?
Except that Ségolène does not sing. She stands like a frozen Madonna, hands raised waist high. But she does not open her mouth. She just stands there.
The issue of her not singing turns out to be a very big deal. This is Marseilles, after all. It’s the equivalent of God Save the Queen being sung at Buckingham Palace. Why is she not singing something so important? Surely she knows the words? Later, I ask Jean Louis Bianco why she did not sing.
“She said she did not feel like it.”
Aix-en-Provence, March 23: 10am
We are back on the bus, headed to a memorial for a former camp where, between 1939 and 1942, 10,000 people were deported, when the bus screeches to a halt on an overpass. Ségolène was supposed to be right ahead of us, but she’s notorious for changing her schedule at the last minute. “Toujours!
Toujours!” hisses a girl from a radio station.
I ask if this happens often.
“Just all the time,” she says miserably.
We find out later that Ségolène went to the street where La Marseillaise was first sung in Marseilles, to make amends for her faux pas the night before. But back on the overpass, the journalists begin complaining about the food. “It’s always fatty charcuterie!” one whinges. Surely there are bigger things to talk about? Like the fact that she made a fool of herself in China, where she praised the efficiency of its criminal justice system.
Or the fact that Hillary Clinton allegedly refused to meet her when she wanted to go to America in December to upstage Sarkozy, who was a big hit in New York.
I escape the angry bus and take a taxi to Aix. At the Socialist Party headquarters, they are awaiting Ségolène’s arrival, but one of the old-time party members is angry about her performance the night before. “Forty years I have been a member of this party,” he says. “Why didn’t she sing?” Another man says that he did not like how she placated the crowd “like a school teacher” when Nicolas Sarkozy’s name was mentioned and they booed and hissed. If these are her supporters, what do her enemies say? For instance, her former economic adviser, Eric Besson, who left her camp and wrote a rather scathing memoir, spoke of her “incompetence”. “I don’t say it because she is a woman, I say it because she doesn’t know her stuff,” he said. But the man in the street will also outline Ségolène’s weaknesses. Every taxi I take, I grill the driver. What about Ségolène? Do you like her? Why not? Too pretty, eh? No, not that, she’s not very clever? Oh, come on!
But in Aix, I find a crowd that likes her. “Well, you know in France, politics are meant to be the problem of men,” says Jacques Agopian, a local politician. “Women are supposed to stay home and take care of the children.
That’s why she has the trust of the women.”
Then she appears, in a long white cashmere coat and purple shoes. “Ségolène!
Présidente!” a handsome black youth shouts from her right side, and she turns and grins, like a charmed student. The crowd sweeps her down the walkway. Like her, or loathe her, people are fascinated by her.
In the Provençal village of Correns, Ségolène finally gives the press its two minutes. She sits at a wooden table in front of a bust of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, with a vase of red roses in front of her. Is it deliberate? Because it is true: she looks remarkably like Marianne with her beautiful aquiline Gallic nose, her almond-shaped eyes, her heart-shaped face. And the roses set off her creamy skin. Even I, a woman, cannot help but be charmed by her extraordinary beauty. But then she fixes her eyes on us, one by one. She orders a photographer to sit down as though she were his mother. Three women reporters dominate with dull questions about the European Union. But a cheeky Italian journalist, braver than I, plunges forward and asks a daring question about Hillary Clinton. Ségolène fixes her eyes on him. She is not Maman Ségo now – in fact, she seems as cold as ice.
On the way out, I see her bend down to kiss some children.
Earlier in the year, one of Ségolène’s former aides, Evelyne Pathouot, wrote a scathing memoir of her former boss which was instantly discredited by the Royal camp. Pathouot said she fell for Royal because she was a woman, dynamic and young. But then she saw her true side. For instance, Pathouot complained that when Royal stayed with her, after dinner, she never helped with the washing up, and in the morning Ségolène languished in bed while Pathouot raced around getting her kids to school. “I felt like I had three kids, not two,” she said. It’s all rather petty, and Pathouot was mocked for this – but why is it that I somehow believe it?
April 3
Ségolène is giving an anodyne press conference at the Socialist Party headquarters. She discusses interest rates and how French banks rob the little people. The first round of the election, I reflect, is less than three weeks away. Shouldn’t the temperature be higher?
Easter Weekend
The talk shows and papers are now in full campaign hysteria with ten days left to go. And what most people are saying is that nearly 50 per cent of voters have not made up their minds. In fact, you cannot trust the polls.
Thomas Legrande, the associate chief political editor of RTL, the most popular radio station in France, says, “The voters hesitate between the Left and the Right. It’s a new phenomenon.”
So, can the former junior minister, Marie-Ségolène Royal, the colonel’s daughter, become the first female president of France? “She’s not Thatcher, don’t fool yourself,” a French political journalist tells me. “But the way she has run this campaign has been interesting, to say the least.” All we want, says my greengrocer in Paris, is a change in this country. “I don’t like Ségolène, not at all,” he says. “But if she can reform France, then so be it.”