The nomination of Ségolène Royal as Socialist Party candidate in next year's presidential elections marks a first in French politics. But will she be able to convince the wider electorate, asks David Tresilian in Paris Members of the French Socialist Party voted last week to nominate Ségolène Royal, a former minister of the environment, schools and the family, to be the party's candidate at next year's French presidential elections, the first time that a woman has won the party's nomination.Royal, the mother of four children and partner of Party General-Secretary François Hollande, easily beat the other two candidates, heavyweights Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius, for the nomination, scoring 60.7 per cent of the vote, as against Strauss- Kahn's 20.5 per cent and Fabius's 18.7 per cent. While Strauss-Kahn, a former minister of finance, and Fabius, a former prime minister, came to the campaign with solid careers in the party and in French politics behind them, both were outmanoeuvered by Royal, who presented herself as an "outsider" in the sometimes closed circles of French politics and as "the candidate of the people and of revolt" against the party establishment. At a time when the Socialist Party is still recovering from the drubbing it received in the last French presidential elections in 2002, when the party's candidate, Lionel Jospin, prime minister at the time, was beaten on the first round of voting by the extreme-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen, Royal has been able to capitalise on a widespread feeling of revulsion in the party at senior figures held to be responsible for a series of painful electoral defeats. The Socialist Party has lost credibility in recent years, not only because of its poor performance in government and its apparent lack of a coherent political programme to remedy France's ills, but also because of the series of corruption scandals that have affected leading party figures. Fabius is associated with the corruption of the Mittérand years, and was himself prosecuted for alleged negligence in the government's handling of contaminated blood supplies in the 1980s. Strauss-Kahn lacks the regional power base enjoyed by both Royal and Fabius, and his career as a professor of economics at a Paris university is not calculated to improve his following either among the electorate or in the party. Royal, by contrast, carried out a campaign that stressed her clean, new image, turning her comparative lack of experience into a virtue. She also carried out an "American-style" campaign, focusing on media appearances, her personal qualities as a woman and a mother, and an imaginative use of the Internet and other forms of communication, which were used to bypass the party machine and appeal directly to voters. However, while this strategy seems to have paid off as far as the party nomination is concerned, there are nevertheless worries that Royal may not have an identifiable political programme or one that will appeal to voters in next year's presidential elections, putting the party's wider fortunes in doubt. According to an editorial in Le Monde last weekend, Royal's success could be put down to her new way of doing things and to the fact that "despite having been involved in politics for 20 years she does not seem to [have been held] responsible for previous socialist management." However, the paper warned, there was "still a long way to go before the presidential elections... [and] she is going to have to emerge from the vagueness in which she has sometimes shrouded herself" regarding her policies if she is to stand a chance of winning at next year's elections. Royal's prospects in these elections, when she will most likely find herself running against the ruling centre-right party's front-runner, Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, are the subject of intense interest in France, some commentators claiming that the Socialist Party's decision to chose Royal as its candidate represents the only way of "blocking the path" to a Sarkozy victory, and others saying that the party's choice of a comparatively inexperienced politician and above all of a woman has signed its death warrant. "France," comment ran in some circles last week, "is not yet ready for a woman president." Aside from questions of this sort, there is also uncertainty regarding Royal's programme and particularly how far she will be able to rally voters on the left behind her presidential campaign. Royal has been criticised for being more of a media figure than a genuine politician, supporters of rival candidates Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius expressing their disappointment last weekend that party members had allowed themselves to be seduced by a "media personality". In addition, Royal's few comments on party policy have shown her to be keen to distance herself from many of the party's flagship nostrums, such as the 35- hour working week introduced by the Jospin government in 2000 and the source of intense controversy ever since. Her comments on extending teachers' working hours have not endeared her to the educational establishment, traditionally a bastion of Socialist Party support, and remarks she made on British Prime Minister Tony Blair in an interview with the British newspaper the Financial Times in February, claiming that he had been unjustly "caricatured" in France, caused consternation. Blair, first elected in 1997 at the head of a government looking for a "third way" between traditional socialist management of the economy and free markets, is sometimes seen as the incarnation of an opportunistic politician in French Socialist Party circles, and as someone who has specialised in weakening social protections and in sowing dissension in the European Union. Royal's comments on law and order, while more carefully phrased than those of her centre-right opponents, have also come as a surprise to left-wing voters. While left-wing politicians in France have traditionally tended to focus on the social problems leading to events such as the riots in France late last year that hit the headlines worldwide, Royal has talked instead of "bringing [the delinquents and their families] into line", notably by making welfare benefits conditional on good behaviour. She has also proposed that any young person convicted of an offence should be placed in a "military- style establishment", a language of discipline and punishment traditionally more prevalent on the French right than on the left. Profiles of Ségolène Royal have tended to focus on her "military" family, her father having been an army officer, and on an educational background, via the Institut d'études politiques ("Sciences Po") and the Ecole nationale d'administration, that puts her in the mainstream of the French elite, whatever the rhetoric of her "outsider" status may suggest. Whether all this will be enough for her to mount a convincing campaign against her opponents in next year's presidential elections is not yet clear. As Le Monde put it last weekend, if Royal is to stand a chance of being elected president, she will have to make her intentions known and "put together a programme for France".
