"Socialists?" the carpenter thumps the coffin he's making. "Mitterrand stood for something, but his lackeys! Going on the television to tell us to vote for Europe?" Most of my neighbours vote right, or extreme right. When the Socialist party bigwigs ventured into France profonde a year ago to show grassroots solidarity against the closure of rural services, the grassroots received them with catcalls and snowballs.
But even my carpenter is intrigued by Ségolène Royal: "The wife quite likes her." Although Mme Royal seems haughty and mondaine, she has built her political career on family matters, and is now rocketing ahead of her rivals—for whom she has even less time than my carpenter—as the best potential president on the left.
The French Parti Socialiste is in a mess. Its leader, François Hollande, is a clever, able politician, but a back-office man with all the charisma of Maximilien Robespierre. Then there are the elephants, the "great men" of the party, who endlessly bicker and continually bore. These include Laurent Fabius, prime minister in the 1980s, a lifetime ago; Jack Lang, a remarkable minister of culture even longer ago; and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, once a brilliant economics minister before he was fingered, though acquitted, for corruption. After the 2002 presidential election, when Lionel Jospin was routed, each assumed his turn had come. Still they wait. The party was humiliated again in last year's referendum, and during November's riots they could find nothing to say.
So now they huddle together, elephants in a storm, their hatred of each other matched only by their new hatred of Ségolène Royal. But the plot thickens, since Royal is the partner of—and shares four children with—their leader, Hollande, another wannabe president.
In France, party leaders do not automatically become official presidential candidates. Each of the elephants has a chance to be elected at November's party conference. And then the defeated members can choose to stand independently: anyone who can muster 500 signatures from elected representatives spread over 30 departments can proclaim him or herself candidate, receiving E13.7m campaign expenses. In the 2002 election, 16 candidates obtained the requisite number of signatures. Eight were on the left, which provided the polite justification for the Socialists' defeat in the first round. This time, they all cry, unity is essential—although, given their egos, factitious. Anyway, any semblance of unity has been destroyed by Royal's rapidly growing and unforeseen popularity. The elephants are trumpeting in terror, revealing their bitter misogyny: "Who will look after the children?" asked Fabius. "Is she competent to be president?"—a question no one would ask of a man who had spent five years working at the Élysée and run three ministries, as Royal has. There is even debate about the suitability of a candidate whose evening dress shows damp under her armpits, even though "soaking his shirt" is favourite shorthand to convey a male politician's passion and conviction.
Ségolène Royal was born an unlikely socialist in 1953: one of eight children in a traditional Catholic family stationed in Senegal, in the heart of the French empire, her father a colonel. After university she went to the Sciences Po before going through ENA in the same year as François Hollande, Dominique de Villepin and a string of ministers and heads of industry. Despite graduating at the tail-end (around 95th place), Royal moved easily into the Elysée, working as adviser on family issues under Mitterrand. In her 30s she became minister of the environment, then a junior schools minister and finally a junior minister for family and childhood. It's that last period which has marked her in the public mind, and if she is edging ahead of Sarkozy in the polls, it's because of her myriad circulars and decrees on family and school life. These, it seems, are appreciated more than the heroic-sounding international policies of her rivals, which now, hélas!, rarely succeed.
Unlike the elephants, Royal refuses to remain in the shadow of Mitterrand, and her views on family life break with post-1968 left-wing tradition. She stresses the importance of parental discipline and has pledged to bring back national service. In a circular she encouraged the public to denounce teachers they suspect of paedophilia, adding that presumption of innocence "covers up paedophiles."
But she may have gone too far: in an interview with the FT in February, she praised Tony Blair, causing outrage in the press and her party. Until then, her views on any major issue had been France's best-kept secret. Her 16 years in parliament have been marked by silence on national and international policies. That in itself is not seen as a problem: after all, not having a programme didn't stop Jacques Chirac from being elected, twice. But she chose to reveal her views to a foreign journalist working for a newspaper perceived as the bastion of the detested free market. And then to praise Blair, bogeyman of the left, champion of social misery. But for Ségolène Royal, it is Blair's rather than Mitterrand's ghost that represents a way out of the grey present—and that's why she's doing well, my carpenter tells me.
