Segolene-Headlines

Le magazine Newsweek se demandait en février dernier « Who’s that girl ? ». Et rappelait que « cette génération de Français n’a pas vu de grand leader féminin ; il n’y en a peut-être pas eu depuis Jeanne d’Arc ».

Les journaux américains, dans leur ensemble, s’intéressent plus au couple Royal-Hollande qu’à la femme seule : « Le couple français pourrait se battre pour la candidature » titre un article de l’Associated Press.

They are France's power couple: He is the Socialist Party boss, and she is the party's most popular politician. Now, Francois Hollande and Segolene Royal might end up competing against each other in the 2007 presidential race.
While Hollande is bespectacled and somewhat bland, Royal is the darling of the polls, with a disarming smile and crisp, chic suits. In a country where women make up only 12 percent of parliament, she seems the more unlikely candidate for president.
And that's exactly why people like her.
Royal, 52, campaigns for some of the traditional family values that are usually the terrain of the right. She has not unveiled a platform and is untested on economic and international affairs. She has often seemed on the Socialist fringe.
Yet France is looking for fresh ideas, especially after three weeks of rioting swept the country last fall, exposing deep problems of unemployment, disenfranchisement and racism faced by youths in poor neighborhoods. Many think Royal might be the left's best weapon against Nicolas Sarkozy, the law-and-order interior minister who is a strong potential candidate for the right

Cette semaine, c'est le New York Times qui consacre un dossier complet à Ségoléne Royal : La Femme


There's a reason that the leaders of France's Socialist Party are called "elephants": They live forever. Among the elephants now vying to become the party's candidate for president in next year's election are Laurent Fabius, who served as prime minister 22 years ago, and Lionel Jospin, who served as Socialist Party leader a quarter-century ago and suffered a defeat in the last presidential election so devastating, both for himself and for the party, that you would have thought prudence alone would dictate political retirement. But in France, politics is a profession; once you arrive, you stay.

No one has thought to call Ségolène Royal an elephant. For one thing, it would be unbecoming, since she is a woman — and a woman who, when she works her smile up into her eyes, bears a passing resemblance to Audrey Hepburn. Royal is, remarkably enough, the first truly présidentiable woman in French history. But what is most striking about her candidacy, which so far consists of a highly orchestrated media seduction, is not the fact that she is a woman but rather that she has positioned herself as a nonelephant, indeed, almost an antielephant. She is, in effect, running against France's political culture, which is to say against remoteness and abstraction, ideological entrenchment and male domination itself. And that culture, which is embodied by her own party, has struck back, ridiculing her as a soap bubble borne aloft by a momentary gust of public infatuation.



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