After 20 years in politics, she's suddenly being mobbed, as the public lap up her appealing formula of liberté, egalité and féminité. With a presidential election looming, will Ségolène Royal be France's new Joan of Arc, asks Lara Marlowe
Ségolène Royal inches forward at the Salon de l'Agriculture, in Paris, surrounded by a scrum of bodyguards, photographers, television cameramen and reporters. It is a barometer of Royal's meteoric rise that more journalists and members of the public follow her around the annual farmers' fair than follow Jacques Chirac, France's president, or Dominique de Villepin, its prime minister. Chants of "Ségolène - présidente" cut through the crackle of flashbulbs.
Onlookers barely catch a glimpse of the slightly built, pretty president of the Poitou-Charentes region, dressed conservatively in a pale-green suit and brown boots. The radiant smile never fades, for the 52-year-old is a professional politician, a deputy in the national assembly since 1988 and a three-time cabinet minister who stands a good chance of becoming France's first woman president.
The first round of the presidential election is still 13 months away, and Royal is in the dizzying but awkward position of having surpassed all her socialist rivals in opinion polls, without the party's investiture, to the horror of the left-wing "elephants" who have watched their own chances shrink with the onset of Ségolomania.
Since early last month Royal has alternated with Nicolas Sarkozy, the right-wing interior minister, for first place in the presidential sweepstakes, with some polls showing her beating Sarkozy by 51 per cent to 49 per cent.
The mood in France has rarely been so sour. The euphoria of opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq evaporated with the re-election of George W Bush. The French see globalisation as a threat to job security and social benefits; they also fear that radical Islam is provoking sectarianism in their country. Last year, France almost single-handedly scuppered the EU constitutional treaty. Five months later, race riots exploded in the black and Arab ghettos surrounding French cities. Unemployment has hovered around 10 per cent for more than two decades.
The country is fed up with the status quo, fed up with politicians. It is looking for a new Joan of Arc - Royal's "historical model". Royal "embodies a spontaneous vote of no confidence against a political class that is incapable of renewing itself and, in particular, of feminising itself", said a recent editorial in Libération newspaper.
France comes 85th in the world in terms of female representation in parliament, between Azerbaijan and Colombia. Only 12.2 per cent of the deputies in the French National Assembly are women, compared with a European average of almost 20 per cent. (Ireland, in 77th place, does marginally better than France, with 13.3 per cent.)
Recent months have seen the election victories of Angela Merkel in Germany, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia and Michelle Bachelet in Chile. Johnson-Sirleaf and Bachelet are the first female heads of state in Africa and South America. In what Bernadette Chirac, France's first lady, calls "the hour of women", the rest of the world seems to have overtaken the land of the Enlightenment.
Mrs Chirac, who dislikes Sarkozy and de Villepin, two of the right-wing rivals to succeed her husband, last month gave Royal her stamp of approval. "She could be a serious candidate. She could even win," Mrs Chirac told journalists during a state visit to India. "Her little buddies in the Socialist Party won't do her any favours, but the hour of women has struck."
Female satisfaction sparked by Royal's candidacy crosses party lines. "I feel jubilant when I see the mugs of the men in the Socialist Party who've seen the Ségolène grenade explode at their feet," Roselyne Bachelot, a former right-wing cabinet minister, told Le Parisien newspaper.
But for some, the emphasis on Royal's gender is the antithesis of male-female equality. "Whether she's a good candidate should be determined by her programme, not by her sex," cautions Marie-George Buffet, leader of the Communist Party.
Éric Zemmour appeared sexist when he wrote in Le Figaro last month: " 'Ségolène' is selling nothing other than her 'femininity'. Those questioned by pollsters are buying nothing else . . . Her femininity effaces all else. She appears new, when she's been in the circles of power for more than 20 years; she pretends to be a girl from the provinces when she's Parisian; her disdain as a militant within the Socialist Party gives her the aura of 'the pure one who rejects plotting'."
Yet evidence seems to support Zemmour's belief that France hungers after female leadership. A poll conducted by Elle magazine in January showed that 94 per cent of French people would approve of a woman president, compared with only 52 per cent in 1972. Fifty-nine per cent said they will "certainly" or "perhaps" vote for Royal if she is a candidate.
In the Elle poll, Royal's gender ranked fifth as a reason for voting for her, after "She would bring new life into politics", "She is competent", "She listens to the concrete problems of French people" and "She has a political project for France".
But pollsters present interviewees with a list of alternative answers. When I asked Royal supporters at the Salon de l'Agriculture why they will vote for her, most answered, "Because she's a woman," including the men. "I want a woman head of state," said Claude Goblet, a 67-year-old former bank director. "Women are much more humane. She can change things. Male politicians have done nothing for us."
Royal's difficult relationship with her overbearing father, a military officer - and the determination not to be like her submissive mother - may have shaped her character. She has lived for a quarter-century with François Hollande, the leader of the Socialist Party. They met as students at the École Nationale d'Administration.
The couple has four children: Thomas, Clémence, Julien and Flora. But Royal has always refused to marry. "If we got married now, people would say it was manipulation," she told the Financial Times in a rare interview last month. His position as party leader means Hollande should be the socialist candidate. But he trails Royal in opinion polls. She says they will decide "together as a couple" which of them will seek the party's official nomination in November.
Marie-Ségolène Royal was born in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, in September 1953, the fourth of eight children. (Ségolène is a Germanic first name, from "Sieg", for victory, and "lind", for sweet or gentle. Her parent's penchant for Germanic names continued; they named their youngest son Sigisbert.) Royal's mother knitted red caps for all eight children. In Chamagne, the small village in the Vosges mountains where she grew up, "when we got lost, that's how people recognised us. A child with a red cap was a Royal", she told Le Nouvel Observateur magazine.
Yet despite such cheery anecdotes, Royal's childhood was apparently unhappy. In Madame Royal, a biography published last September, Daniel Bernard, its author, says Royal poured herself into study to escape her father.
She felt liberated when she was sent to the Notre-Dame d'Épinal boarding school, at the age of 15. She moved on to the Fondation Nationale des Science Politiques and the École Nationale d'Administration - standard education for high-ranking French politicians and diplomats.
According to the investigative newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné, Royal's father eventually abandoned his wife and children. The experience seems to have endowed her with steely inner resolution, even toughness. "Elle est dure, très dure," says a high-ranking civil servant who has worked with Royal. "Yes, I'm bossy. That's fine," she told the Financial Times. "I'm the boss after all."
In an earlier interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Royal commented on a 1993 photograph of her with Elisabeth Guigou and Martine Aubry, socialists who, like her, served as cabinet ministers. "It was often said of us three that we were hard," Royal said. "It's the witch syndrome. When a women gets angry, she is vilified. Being a woman, to have come from the rib of a man, is supposed to be incompatible with the exercise of power. We've been dragging this around for thousands of years. So in a political campaign, they hit below the belt."
The biggest obstacle on Royal's path to the Élysée may be the men whom Bernadette Chirac calls her "little socialist buddies". After Royal announced last autumn that she would compete for the Socialist Party nomination, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a senator, commented tartly that the presidential election "is not a beauty contest". The former prime minister Laurent Fabius asked: "Who would look after the children?" Their sarcasm backfired, and Royal shot up in the polls. They and others have since tried to hold their tongues. But Royal remains, in the words of the far-right presidential candidate Philippe de Villiers, "a piece of china in a shop full of elephants".
Though Royal had already expressed admiration for Tony Blair, the British prime minister, last year (a feeling she shares with Sarkozy), her praise of him in the Financial Times created a scandale in the Socialist Party. "I think Tony Blair has been caricatured in France. It does not bother me to claim adherence to some of his ideas," she said. In particular, Blair has invested in public services and created jobs for young people, she explained.
The last socialist politician to have advocated liberal economics received only 1 per cent of the vote at the party congress, Fabius warned Royal. Blairism "cannot be applied in France", Lionel Jospin, another former socialist prime minister, intoned. Jospin withdrew from political life after losing to the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of the 2002 election. He nonetheless remained a moral reference for the party, and Royal's opponents hope that a Jospin candidacy can be resurrected as a last resort to prevent her from standing. Unfortunately for them, Jospin is more than 20 percentage points behind Royal in opinion polls.
"If she makes it to the run-off, she'll take at least 49 per cent of the vote," predicts a high-ranking French official. "Even if she doesn't win the Élysée in 2007, she'll control the Socialist Party for the next 20 years; they'll do anything to avoid that."
In the wake of Royal's pro-Blair statements, when she was surpassing even Sarkozy for the first time in the polls, Jospin claimed there was not yet an obvious choice for the socialist nomination. In response, Royal called herself a "quiet, smiling force" - a variation on her late mentor François Mitterrand's 1981 campaign slogan. "I have no intention of improvising, of spreading myself too thin," she said. "When the time comes, if I need to be ready, I'll be ready."
The row over Blair also cast a chill on Royal's relations with Bertrand Delanoë, the socialist mayor of Paris. Royal doesn't give press conferences, but in casual remarks during a visit to the Salon de la Pantoufle (pantoufles, or slippers, are a speciality of her region), she added insult to injury, saying: "I haven't forgotten that Tony Blair won the Olympic Games [ for London in 2012]." Royal accused the French delegation of "arrogance" and of putting forward "an old-fashioned vision" of France. Blair knew how to convey "the multicultural identity" of English youth, she said.
Since the fuss over her Blair and Delanoë remarks, Royal has clammed shut. "Even when I say nothing, people talk about it," she remarked. Her most controversial statement at the Salon de l'Agriculture was an exhortation to the head of the farmers' union FNSEA to "Get angry!" about delays in aid for poultry farmers hurt by bird flu. A smile frozen on her face, Royal repeatedly deflected all questions not related to agriculture with the words: "I will tell you nothing."
Royal has built up a positive image across the centre of the French political spectrum. The Greens remember her attending the Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, as environment minister, heavily pregnant and accompanied by a military doctor. In Poitou-Charentes, she has banned genetically-modified organisms, promoted biofuels and saved marshlands from a motorway. Her status as a mother of four, and her refusal to join other socialists in advocating gay marriage and the right to adoption for gay couples, appeal to conservatives. But, on economic and social issues, she tries to calm French fears of losing job security and government benefits.
As a leading presidential hopeful, Royal is under tremendous pressure to put some meat on the bones of her past statements and achievements. As minister for school education and, later, the family, her opposition to pornography on television, paedophilia and teenage pregnancy was well received, if uncontroversial. Now people are clamouring to know what she proposes to do about unemployment, immigration and France's role in the world, but she is silent.
It was perhaps to counter allegations that she lacks the "calibre" or "stature" of a head of state that Royal accepted an invitation from a small group of western diplomats to lunch at a restaurant near the Eiffel Tower in late January. Her words were meant to remain secret, but they were leaked to Le Monde. The presidential candidate stuck to generalities, for example suggesting that a shorter version of the European constitutional treaty should be ratified by parliament, not referendum. That was the position of the Socialist Party congress last November, and it has long been the position of Sarkozy.
Royal and Hollande often quote a Mitterrand saying about the need to "give time to time". Denis Leroy, a close aide, told Libération that Royal "will not fall into the trap of talking about everything as if she were an expert. People don't want know-it-alls any more". Some 40 foreign journalists have waited up to four months for interviews with Royal, her press attache says. "She doesn't want to be omnipresent, to wear out public opinion," a member of her cabinet explains. "She hasn't yet" - note the "yet" - "gained the party's backing; she doesn't want to annoy the party by dominating media coverage."
Royal has postponed publication of a book in which she is to recount her background and philosophy, from next month until "late August or early September, to give her time to refine her thoughts", her press attache says.
So is Royal a modern Joan of Arc, poised to deliver France from its despairing mood? Or is she, as critics in the Socialist Party would have it, an "empty shell" whose popularity will collapse as soon as she starts talking? For the moment, Royal is performing a tightrope act, trying to connect with the people of France over the heads of the party apparatus, avoiding the media who pursue her.
Act I will end with the party nomination, in November. If she wins, the 2007 presidential contest could surpass the 2002 Chirac-Le Pen battle for suspense and long-term repercussions.