Segolene-Headlines

In a place as desperate for renewal as modern France - its voice in the world diminished, its economy depleted, its social landscape fractured by ethnic discord - the rise of Mme Royal has caused a sensation.

Although, like her rival, she has yet to declare her candidacy formally, the dark and smoky political salons of Paris were buzzing last week with excited talk of "le phénomène Sego". "If she believes she can win - and she does - she will certainly stand," said Daniel Bernard, a journalist whose sympathetic biography Madame Royal has become a runaway bestseller.

With her glossy coiffure and natural elegance, Mme Royal is the first Frenchwoman to earn a sniff of real power since the disastrous prime ministerial interlude of Edith Cresson in the early 1990s.

Such ignominy did Mme Cresson heap upon the office - achieving, in the process, a staggering disapproval rating of 87 per cent - that many analysts doubted whether the country would allow another woman in a top job for generations.

But although Mme Royal comes from the same over-educated, administrative class background that produced Mme Cresson, she is a far more engaging, sophisticated, and, therefore, plausible prospect for the Elysée Palace than any woman before her.

Disdainful of the boutique Leftism and Anglophobia that pervades the elite of the French Socialist Party, she speaks up for social conservatism, with its focus on family and community values, and has praised the achievements of Tony Blair's Britain. "I think Blair has been unfairly caricatured in France," she said recently.

"It doesn't bother me to adhere to some of his ideas."

Polls show her to be streets ahead of all other Socialist candidates - including her long-time (and, many say, long-suffering) live-in boyfriend, François Hollande, the party chairman.(...)
By contrast, M Sarkozy is speeding along with all wagons loaded. The wildly ambitious interior minister has made no secret of where he stands on the key issues - a mending of relations with Britain and the United States, a reform of France's over-regulated, sclerotic economy, and "the immigration we want to have, not the immigration that is imposed upon us". It is a package that may prove hard to beat.

The polls, while fickle, already show the Right-wing candidate with a consistent edge - yet an edge narrow enough to make commentators confident that Sego v Sarko will be the most absorbing and significant political showdown in modern French history. "Opinion polls do not make an election," Mme Royal says. "What people recognise in me is the work I have done. I am a fighter."

The fight will be tough and ugly, but in 1972 only half of French voters believed that a woman would ever become president and now nine out of 10 do. Now that is "le phénomène Sego".


http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/200...