Segolene-Headlines

The Guardian : The woman who would be president

2006-10-08T13:12:21+02:00

Royal is an outsider who has bucked the system of the hierarchical, male-dominated French left: rather than bide her time as an apprentice of the ageing men dubbed "les éléphants" who run the Parti Socialiste, she has won herself cult status and an army of devoted supporters. Her fans believe that she alone can rescue France from the gloom, depression and glaring social inequalities of 12 years under President Jacques Chirac.

France certainly has problems. Youth unemployment is among the worst in western Europe, violent crime is rising and many fear that last year's riots in the run-down, immigrant suburbs - where teenagers say daily racism plagues their lives - could erupt again with the slightest spark. In the last presidential election in 2002, France was horrified when the far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen knocked the socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin from the race in the first round. This time, Nicolas Sarkozy, the charismatic and demagogic interior minister and centre-right presidential hopeful, is making no secret of trying to appeal to far-right sympathisers with his tough stance on immigration.

With her huge popular support, Royal has imposed herself on the Socialist party as the only one capable of rousing electors. This weekend, she is expected to finally formally declare her intention to be the Socialist presidential candidate. But the elephants will not go down without a fight. Her rivals for the nomination are likely to include two former prime ministers and two other grands hommes of government. They say she is inexperienced and a ratings bubble waiting to burst. "It is going to be nasty," admits one Royal supporter.

Royal says her most important weapon in the struggle to take the Socialist nomination in November, and the Elysée next May, are her "treasures", the growing band of followers in her movement, Désirs d'Avenir - "Wishes for the Future". Thousands of these followers work for free for Royal, canvassing support, hosting barbecues, leading meetings, blogging and emailing suggestions on policy. Such has been her success that of the 185,000 Socialist party members eligible to vote in November, at least 85,000 of them have joined over the past year in an online recruitment drive. Wishes for the Future claim that most of these recruits have joined to vote Ségolène.

Royal's use of the internet to rally support has earned her the title of the "electronic Messiah". More than 34,000 people have so far contributed to her site, Desirsdavenir.org, where she invites them to shape her policies and co-write her forthcoming book. Numerous supporters run chatrooms devoted to her, including her eldest son, Thomas, who runs the official blog for young Royal supporters, the Ségosphère.

"I want you all to spend 15 minutes a day on my website, it will give you a boost for the day and you'll learn a lot," she preached from a wooden platform in Bondy town hall in the troubled northern Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis last week, after summoning 200 leaders of her regional support groups to a rally. "Ségolène President!" they chanted. One supporter, Medhi Benhabri, who works for Paris city hall, said Royal's website made possible the "utopian dream of the citizen shaping the politician's ideas". How many hours a day did he devote to her cause? He couldn't say exactly, but, "a lot".

Like the last socialist president, the wily and deeply enigmatic François Mitterrand, to whom she was once adviser, Royal is playing the provincial card, touring la France profonde - the country's regions - promising to shift power away from the Paris elite.

Over the past months she has perfected the "new look" which she used in the sports hall in Martignas-sur-Jalle near Bordeaux - stepping off the stage, taking the mic to the centre of the audience, declaring "The Right must go!", then speaking without notes on her idea of a "Republic of Respect", a new France that is "moral and fair". Before she arrived at the sports hall that night, I followed her on a typically gruelling 12-hour day of campaigning around the Bordeaux region. At the village of Mesterieux, she glided smiling into a crowd of more than 200 wine-makers who face having to tear up their vines as Europe battles to drain its surplus wine-lake. She so charmed them that the old ladies lined up to kiss her and have their photographs taken with her. Then, on an industrial site, she sympathised with aviation workers whose jobs were under threat.

"I like her because she has suffered," said one Gironde cheese-maker after seeing her for the first time. "Because she has been through hard times, I feel she understands me."

Allusions to Royal's troubled childhood seem to follow her wherever she goes, and are repeated in the latest array of books about her. She was the fourth of eight children of an army colonel named Jacques Royal. He wore a monocle, played Gregorian chants around the house and insisted his children went to mass and vespers every day. Ségolène was born in Dakar, Senegal, where he was stationed at the time, but the family then settled in rural Lorraine in north-east France. There, Col Royal meted out draconian punishments to his children, reportedly shaving his sons' heads if he caught them misbehaving. He believed women should stay at home and produce children as his wife had done. He once said: "I have five children ... and three daughters." It was not a place where girls were encouraged to have a voice and Royal immediately began striving to be better than the rest. "I realised I had to be financially independent to avoid humiliation," she has said.

Carl Meeus, co-author of a recent book about Royal and her partner, the Socialist Party leader François Hollande, who has trailed the couple for a decade, says: "We found it very difficult to get her to talk about her childhood; she doesn't like speaking about the past. She prefers the future." He says Royal was particularly scarred by the family crisis that erupted just after she went to university on a scholarship, when her mother finally left her father. With Col Royal refusing to pay any maintenance, her mother took cleaning jobs and relied on Ségolène, who urged the brothers and sisters to bring a court case against their father, which they won.

At the exclusive Ecole National d'Administration, training ground of the French ruling class, Royal was in the same class as the current prime minister, Dominique de Villepin. It was also there that she met Hollande, a doctor's son. He was awed by her steely determination and steered it into politics. She would later hold ministerial positions for education, environment, family and childhood while he took the reins of the Socialist party in 2002. They have four children, now in their teens and twenties, but have never married. The fact that Hollande may step aside and forfeit his own chance of running for president to support her bid astonishes her opponents on the left, who perhaps overlook his slack ratings in the opinion polls. They feel that Royal should be like Hillary Clinton and wait until her husband has had his go. Some of the elephants and others in France's unreconstructed political classes are, in fact, half hoping that he will take over from her at the last minute this weekend.

Royal's carefully constructed image seems built to withstand whatever is thrown at it. Her cousin Anne-Christine Royal recently announced she is to run as a candidate for Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front in municipal elections next month. Her older brother, working for the French secret services, was reportedly involved in the operation which blew up the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in 1985. But stories like these do not seem to put off the public - they just endear her further to them as a smiling survivor.

She is popular for refusing a police escort, and this summer, when her Paris flat was mysteriously ransacked - nothing was stolen - she protested about the way the incident was made public by the interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, her likely rival for the Elysée. But she is sternly able to play the law-and-order card as well: when she was recently hit with a custard pie while addressing crowds in La Rochelle, she ensured a complaint was made and the culprit, a leftwing protester, appeared in court.

"The more her opponents attack her, the more people like her," says Jean Guérard, of Aquitaine regional council. "When Laurent Fabius [the former prime minister and rival socialist presidential candidate] asked, 'Who will look after the children?' if she ran, the public rallied to her. She won't reply to the criticisms in public, she won't join the slanging matches and that just lifts her higher in people's estimation, it sets her apart."

MEP Gilles Savary, who defected from Fabius to join Royal's inner circle, says: "She's very difficult to destabilise. In public, she doesn't show hurt. She said to me the other day, 'I must not cry. Men can cry, like Lionel Jospin [who recently shed tears at a socialist rally]. It's in fashion for men. But if I cry, I'm finished, I would never be a candidate again. Look at what they would do to me in public, they would talk of nothing but my fragility.'"

"It's all about the people," she smiled between meetings in Bordeaux. "The people are at the heart of my project." Later, chasing her down a stairwell at Bondy town-hall after her meeting with the faithful, I asked her what was the one thing that kept her going: "The desire to live up to the hopes and expectations that all these people have placed in me. My need to rise to the challenge of the trust that the people, the country, has given me."

Royal, who for months was lampooned for not defining her political ideas but promoting a woolly notion of family values and public morals, has begun using her journeys around the country to clarify her vision to modernise France. An admirer of Tony Blair, within a party which was always suspicious of him, Royal, like Mitterrand, somehow manages to be both of the right and of the left. She outraged those on the party's left by suggesting a form of military service for unruly teenagers on riot-torn estates and criticised the Socialists' cherished 35-hour working week. Yet she is hugely pro-trade union and has promised to ban genetically modified food. Although pro-Blair, she is not pro the war in Iraq. "My diplomatic policy would not consist of going and kneeling in front of George Bush," she has said.

"I don't think she always wanted to be president. I think she stood up because she had another message to give," Savary says. "The Socialist party in France has been a closed-off, sealed-off clique of men, cut off from the population. She's not afraid to confront the taboos that the party once left alone, like security and crime, and France's ghettoes."

Dominique Bertinotti, one of the few female mayors of a Paris arrondissement, says Royal's very existence is in itself revolutionary. She is the only woman head of a region in France, a country where women only got the vote in 1944 and where political parties prefer to pay fines rather than meet quotas for female representation. "To see the very macho reactions to her, even among our own comrades, shows how she is breaking taboos," she says.

Royal's big promise is to give the people a voice in a society where those in power have stopped listening to the street. "The citizen is the expert, let's have a dialogue," is her refrain. But rivals in the party have laid into her for ducking difficult questions. On the platform in Bondy last week, she asked for questions from the floor, adding,"We are a democracy, after all." One man stood up and said, "What is the first measure you'll take if you're elected?" She neatly sidestepped answering.

Before she left, Royal promised the crowd, "Power won't change me." But many outside the Ségosphère still wonder who she really is, and what won't be changing.

Angelique Chrisafis
Thursday September 28, 2006
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,,1882612,00.html

Time: Faudrait-il être triste, laid et ennuyeux pour faire de la politique ?

2006-10-06T16:54:57+02:00

L'hebdomadaire américain Time consacre sa couverture à celle "qui secoue la France", ne serait-ce que par "sa féminité".
En effet, demande Time en la citant, "pourquoi faudrait-il être triste, laid et ennuyeux pour faire de la politique ?"
Time semble adhérer à cette opinion et critique ses rivaux "mâles et gris" au sein du PS.

L'hebdo : Elle surprend. Pas seulement par son look... Mais aussi par le contenu de son propos.

2006-10-06T17:09:25+02:00

Vu de loin, il semble que la gauche et la droite s'étripent autour de leurs vieilles postures idéologiques. L'une défendra d'abord l'égalité. L'autre la liberté. Les candidats martèlent sans relâche ces antiennes", écrit L'Hebdo pour commenter la précampagne pour l'élection présidentielle en France. Avant de nuancer son propos : "Mais c'est bien plus compliqué."

Face à la droite, "les éléphants socialistes cultivent les mêmes ambiguïtés. Ils en rajoutent sur leurs convictions de gauche en sachant très bien qu'une fois élus, ils n'échapperont pas à la nécessité de réformes désagréables. Mais là, pas un mot. Il s'agit de glaner des voix jusqu'à l'extrême gauche."

Reste Ségolène Royal. Elle "surprend", estime L'Hebdo. "Pas seulement par son look, comme on le dit partout. Mais aussi par le contenu de son propos. Encore faut-il le connaître. Tous les médias répètent, avec ses adversaires, particulièrement venimeux dans son propre camp, qu'‘elle ne dit rien'. Or lorsqu'on lit son discours, qualifié partout de ‘vide et décevant', on découvre des idées."

Excellent dossier dans Courrier International : Ségolène est-elle de gauche ?

2006-10-06T17:18:47+02:00

Au sommaire :
Du neuf avec du vieux
Entre valeurs de gauche et blairisme, le dilemme socialiste
“Público” n’a rien compris
Une cible mouvante, donc difficile à abattre
Etrange phénomène
Sémantique : Dans ségolisme, il y a bien gaullisme, non ?
http://www.courrierinternational.com

Financial Times : L'étoile montante de l'opposition socialiste

2006-10-06T17:09:53+02:00

."L'étoile montante de l'opposition socialiste" a provoqué un tollé à gauche en brisant le tabou des 35 heures obligatoires, qui, selon elle, ont miné les droits des travailleurs les plus faibles. Pour le quotidien londonien, Ségolène Royal, qui est "très photogénique", fait preuve d'un éclectisme politique que les éléphants du PS français auront du mal à contourner

L'actualité.com : la voie Royal

2006-05-18T02:00:00+02:00

Brillante, élégante, charismatique, Ségolène Royal la socialiste deviendra-t-elle en 2007 la première présidente de la République française? Notre reporter l'a suivie pendant une journée.

10 h 47 Le TGV entre en gare de Poitiers, à une heure 37 minutes de Paris. En descendant, je repère une passagère d’une indéniable beauté. Je finis par la reconnaître: c’est Ségolène Royal, la femme politique la plus populaire de France, celle que je suis venu «couvrir» dans son fief, la région dont elle est présidente, le Poitou-Charentes. Je me présente. Son sourire est franc, sa poignée de main aussi. Je lui explique que je la retrouverai sur le campus universitaire, où elle participe aujourd’hui à un forum sur les éco-industries.

«Est-ce qu’une voiture vous attend? me demande-t-elle.

— Non, j’allais prendre un taxi.

— Si vous voulez, je vous emmène.»

La suite

No one has thought to call Ségolène Royal an elephant.

2006-05-15T18:05:00+02:00

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.

La suite ici

The Independent : il ne faut surtout pas prendre Ségolène Royal à la légère

2006-10-06T17:17:59+02:00

The Independent a consacré trois pages, lundi 15 mai, à la saga médiatico-politique de Ségolène Royal.

Selon John Lichfield, le correspondant en France du quotidien londonien, "Ségolène Royal s'en tient à sa stratégie : garder ses distances avec les autres candidats mêlés à la candidature socialiste".

Pour tenter de mieux cerner le personnage, John Lichfield a suivi la "candidate putative" sur ses terres, en Poitou-Charentes.

"Mme Royal a servi un intéressant discours à une centaine de ses administrés, ainsi qu'à un petit groupe de journalistes français et étrangers. Il s'agissait essentiellement d'un discours sur la splendeur du Marais poitevin, mais elle a su, assez intelligemment, glisser à la fin quelques mots sur l'avenir de la France et sur la personne qui sera amenée à diriger le pays. Selon Ségolène, [ce futur leader devra] être attaché à la lente sédimentation de l'histoire de France (sous-entendu : n'écoutez pas tous ces commentateurs étrangers, ainsi que Sarkozy, qui veulent que la France ressemble un peu à la Grande-Bretagne ou aux Etats-Unis. Non, non, non ! Il est possible de réformer la France et de rester français).

John Lichfield a remarqué que, pour sa précampagne, Ségolène Royal a décidé de tout miser sur Internet. "Les sujets qu'elle aborde sur son site sont ceux qui lui sont chers : les enfants, l'éducation, la santé, l'environnement."

Aussi, "la plus grande force de Ségolène réside-t-elle dans sa plus grande faiblesse : le fait d'être une femme. Elle est différente des autres parce qu'elle n'est pas un homme et qu'elle ne menace pas de tout changer. Quelque chose de différent qui, sur le fond, ne changera rien. Un positionnement qui colle parfaitement au sentiment d'exaspération – un rien retors – de l'électorat français."

"Les ennemis de Ségolène Royal au sein de son propre parti disent en persiflant qu'elle n'a pas d'idées concrètes à proposer. C'est en partie vrai, mais c'est aussi vrai pour les autres candidats et même pour Nicolas Sarkozy. Le 'royalisme' ou le 'ségolénisme' - comme en son temps le blairisme ou le clintonisme – est moins un programme qu'un style politique du genre : je comprends vos peines. Et c'est pour cette raison qu'il ne faut surtout pas prendre Ségolène Royal à la légère."

Financial Times : French presidential candidate's ratings surge

2006-04-21T18:35:00+02:00

The big story these days on the left is that Segolène Royal's bid to be the socialist candidate is becoming more realistic by the day - and has reached some kind of critical mass.

Ségolène Royal's opinion poll ratings have surged ahead of all the other likely candidates for next year's French presidential elections partly thanks to her innovative campaigning style on the internet and in magazine interviews.
In to the latest poll, published in Le Figaro newspaper on Thursday, a year ahead of the first round of elections, Ms Royal won the backing of 34 per cent of respondents.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of the ruling UMP party and most probable standard bearer for the French right, was the second most popular politician, with 30 per cent.
The prospect of a "Sarko-Ségo" battle between two such contrasting and colourful personalities has already captivated the French media. (...)
Ms Royal's popularity appears partly due to her novelty as a serious female candidate - the former environment minister appeared on the cover of five magazines last week - as well as her maverick campaigning style. Ms Royal has launched a website called desirsdavenir.org (desires for the future), encouraging the public to contribute to a "participative forum" and promising to adopt the best ideas.
Her critics have argued that her "wiki-programme" has only exposed the hollowness of her ideology but it has certainly aroused the interest of France's internet users.
(...)
However, he added: "Her ideas, which she has largely borrowed from Tony Blair, do not seem to me to be compatible with the Socialist party's increasing drift to the left."
That last theme is being replayed all over the place (there was an article in Libé yesterday purporting to show that she was "borrowing" lots of her programme from the center-right), but let's all remember what she actually said about Blair: he should not be demonised because he actually increased spending on helathcare and education massively... 

https://registration.ft.com/registration/barrier?referer=http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2006/4/21/0391/39214&location=http%3A//news.ft.com/cms/s/8cdcced4-d091-11da-b160-0000779e2340.html

Elle ne ressemble à aucun des caciques de la classe politique française

2006-04-18T19:10:00+02:00

Le blog de Basile, la France vue d'ailleurs, revient sur l'écho que reçoit la pré-candidature de Ségolène Royal dans la presse britannique.

Principal atout de Ségolène Royal: elle ne ressemble à aucun des caciques de la classe politique française, au propre et au figuré. «Ses yeux bleus et son sourire à la blancheur éclatante font penser à une charmante présentatrice de télévision». Puis son style de vie, ajoute le Times, plait aux Françaises soucieuses de relever le «double défi de leur carrière professionnelle et celui d’élever leurs enfants, tout en étant capables d’apprécier fromage et vin… sans prendre du poids».
“Her glossy hair, blue eyes and blinding white teeth make her look more like a glamorous television anchorwoman than a politician.”

Pour autant, note le Sunday Times qui a de la mémoire, la tâche de «Sarko» face à «Ségo» sur ce terrain de la féminisation n’est pas des plus faciles dans un pays machiste dont le président, Jacques Chirac, avait commis une indélicatesse, rappelle-t-il, à l’égard de Margaret Thatcher lors d’un sommet européen il y a dix-huit ans avec son non-authentifié mais célèbre «que me veut cette mégère, mes couilles sur un plateau?» Pour les Françaises, il n’y a pas photo. Ségolène Royal reste un booster de carrière dont le succès les aiderait «personnellement à progresser» dans la hiérarchie au sein des entreprises, selon un sondeur interrogé par quotidien de Londres.

Chercher la femme