France: The irresistible rise of Ségolène Royal

A flexible and popular candidate meets an immovable and less popular party

WHEN Britain's Labour Party chose Tony Blair as leader in 1994, left-wingers held their noses. Despite their distaste, he felt fresh, looked good and was popular enough to offer Labour its best chance of regaining power after 15 years in the wilderness. In France, where the Socialist Party has not had the presidency for 11 years, and an election is due next spring, a similar hunger has taken hold. The difference is that party grandees are putting up stiff resistance to the candidate who feels fresh, looks good and has conquered public opinion: Segolene Royal.

When Ms Royal first hinted at her presidential ambitions nine months ago in Paris-Match, Socialist old-timers responded with scorn. "Who will look after the children?" sneered Laurent Fabius, a former prime minister, of this mother of four. Others pointed to her lack of heavyweight experience--she has served only in "soft" ministries such as education and the family. But the more she was dismissed, the more the public took to her. In a poll for Liberation this week, 68% of Socialist voters said they wanted her as their presidential candidate, against 27% for the next choice, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Until recently, Ms Royal's strategy has been to say as little as possible, avoid policy questions, and watch her poll numbers climb. At last autumn's party conference, she sat silently as party elders tramped to the platform to pontificate, confiding shortly afterwards that her discretion was "deliberate". Timing, she said, was all.

Over the past week, however, Ms Royal has kicked up a stink among the Socialist old guard. First, this daughter of an army colonel argued for a clamp-down on teenage criminals, calling for first-time offenders to be sent to boot camp, and for parents of delinquents to be dispatched to parenting school and have their benefits reviewed. Hardly had the outcry died away before she broke another taboo, the 35-hour week, introduced by a previous Socialist government. This time, she veered leftwards. Her criticism was not that it stifled the work ethic or burdened companies, but that it had bred too much insecurity: bosses had won flexible working practices in return for reducing the working week with no loss of pay. "Managers have benefited from extra days off and workers have had to work on Saturdays," she wrote on her website (she is compiling a book based on online contributions).

At first glance, she seems guilty of ideological incoherence. In one breath, she criticises--however counter-intuitively--the 35-hour week for being too liberal; in another, she praises Mr Blair's employment record. Her web chapter, "The disorder of jobs and work", is hardly a Blairite manifesto, denouncing "a globalised hyper-class" and its belief in the "all-powerful and all-beneficent market". This week, Ms Royal stressed that she still supported the 35-hour week in principle. "I am a Socialist," she declared, in case of doubt.

Within the party, her outbursts have caused consternation. "With the ideas she is developing today, she is cutting the party in two," Claude Allegre, a former education minister, told Le Parisien. Even Francois Hollande, the party leader and Ms Royal's "partner", said that he did not agree with all her ideas. A disciplined party that functions through committees and consensus, it has not taken well to her blog-led quest for new thinking, or to her unilateral outspokenness. This week, the Socialists finalised an electoral programme that situates the party firmly to the left, calling for a big rise in the minimum wage, for renationalisation of the electricity utility, and for extra taxes on companies that distribute profits as dividends rather than re-investing them.

Yet it may be that Ms Royal is on to a rather smarter approach. She is pursuing a strategy of brand differentiation: entrenching her image among the electorate, which is tired of the stale grey political class, as fresh and innovative. She even talks of "segolisme". Coherence matters less than distinctiveness. In this, she resembles Nicolas Sarkozy, the leading right-wing contender, who has built his image as a straight-talking, combative risk-taker. He joked this week that she "would make an acceptable candidate for the right".

Although her security hard-talk provoked much liberal hand-wringing in Paris, it drew applause at a meeting in northern France. A poll in Le Figaro suggested that 66% of the French agreed with her. Many left-leaning voters are fed up with the party's soft approach, which often excuses criminality. Moreover, fears about security are feeding the far right. In one poll, a staggering 31% of voters say they want the National Front's Jean-Marie Le Pen to stand for the presidency.

A second element in Ms Royal's strategy is to use her poll ratings to conquer the party, where she lacks a base. A new opinion poll by TNS-Sofres shows her to be France's most popular politician, fully ten points ahead of Mr Sarkozy, and the only candidate on the left who would beat him in a run-off. Thanks to an internet membership drive, the Socialist Party has expanded to over 200,000 members, a jump of almost 60% since March. An internal poll shows that many newcomers have neither belonged to a party before nor set foot in a Socialist meeting. Yet all those registered by June 1st will help to choose the presidential candidate in November. They could be just the sort who are drawn to the novelty and sense of renewal that Ms Royal seems to embody.

All the same, leading Socialists expect Ms Royal to trip up. Their rancour is breathtaking. Many consider her a media creation just waiting to implode. "The media is not interested in competence," laments one, "only in a beauty contest." One fear is that the party might pick her as a candidate--only for her to tumble afterwards, wrecking the left's chances next spring. According to one insider, her rival candidates are working towards an informal pact to back each other in the run-off for the party's nomination, in a bid to thwart Ms Royal. Some are even muttering about bringing back Lionel Jospin, a retired former prime minister.

If the presidential election were held tomorrow, "Sego" and "Sarko" would cruise to the second round. Under the fifth republic, however, no poll has correctly forecast the two run-off candidates a year in advance. In 1994, for example, Mr Chirac languished way behind Edouard Balladur, a rival on the centre-right, and yet he won the presidency a year later. In 2002, Mr Jospin was expected to coast into the run-off. Instead, Mr Chirac defeated Mr Le Pen. It would be foolish to bet on Ms Royal now--but just as foolish to write her off.