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Madame Blair
Ségolène Royal must like living dangerously. The French public's favourite Socialist Party presidential candidate might look mild-mannered and her stated policies innocuous, but she's just put her candidacy on the line by praising one of the French left's most despised figures.
In what the Independent correctly describes as an "heretical admission" for someone on the left, Mme Royal admitted an admiration for Britain's Tony Blair.
"It does not bother me to state my support for some of his ideas," she told the Financial Times in an interview last week, "he re-invested in public services. In dealing with youth unemployment, he has had real success by linking greater flexibility with greater security."
She added that the Socialists shouldn't be "blocked" by any of their previous ideas such as the 35-hour week, a policy viewed by industry and small businesses as disastrous but which has become a totem for the French left, who introduced it in 1998.
"There shouldn't be any taboos," she said, "we have to be curious to try anything that works."
A few days later, she complained that French leftists "caricatured" Blair and his policies. "Tony Blair won the Olympic Games and we didn't," she added, in what is apparently a snub to Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe's support for Lionel Jospin. Jospin lost two presidential elections in 1995 and 2002 - not normally a disadvantage in French politics, where longevity is expected to bring high office eventually. However, much of the commentary surrounding 2007's presidential election has been based on the opportunity it poses to make a break with the past elite. Both Royal and the other front-runner, Nicolas Sarkozy, delight in distancing themselves from the grey-suited technocrats who have dominated French politics since de Gaulle. The "continuity candidate", Jacques Chirac's choice Dominique de Villepin, has dipped in the polls recently.
In contrast, Royal has been riding high - at least before Friday's heresy. A poll put the former Family Affairs Minister far ahead of other PS candidates - including her partner, party leader François Hollande. A 25 to 27 percent of first preference votes would almost guarantee a place in the second "head-to-head" round of the election, where she would likely face interior minister Sarkozy (26 to 30 percent).
In the final run-off, the opinion poll gave Royal the edge, with 51 percent to 49 percent of the vote. It's the first time that anyone on the left has managed to dent Sarkozy's apparently unassailable lead as 2007's president-in-waiting, though it remains to be seen if the Royal "threat" will lead centre-right voters to consider if the middle-of-the-road nationalist de Villepin would be a better final round challenger to Royal than the radical Sarkozy.
That is, of course, if the Socialist Party's warring tribes want to give Ségolène Royal a chance to take Sarko on. She might be the French public's favoured choice from the PS rogue's gallery, but like any good socialists, her fellow members are not so sure whether the public can be trusted to make such important choices.
Shockingly for a party supposed to belong to Europe's progressive left, there has been a strong whiff of sexism around some of the criticism directed at her. Laurent Fabius - who led protests against the EU Constitution and considers himself a potential presidential candidate - wondered who would look after Royal's four children should she become president. Senator Jean-Luc Melenchon said that presidential elections "are not beauty contests."
Her support for Blair was hardly blind adoration, but that won't stop Royal's party rivals from seizing on what they're calling "her first blunder."
Both the Jospin and Fabius camps claim that Royal is trying to position herself as a "moderniser" or "reformer": If so, they say, she's misjudging the mood on the left. The last time a Socialist Party figure took this "social liberal line", Le Figaro reminds us, was when the mayor of Mulhouse Jean-Marie Bockel professed an admiration for the British PM.
Bockel won fewer than 1 percent of votes from PS activists at the party conference.
"I don't think the PS will find a new direction in injustice", said Fabius's right-hand man Claude Bartolone, playing on the widely-held French belief that Britain's economic success is built on unfair working contracts. Jospin loyalist Eric Besson added "Ségolène Royal has a right to make these statements, but personally, if I wanted to open the debate on flexibility and security I would look at the Scandinavian rather than the British model."
Another rival spokesman said that French socialists should neither support or abominate British employment laws in general, but that Royal had picked a bad example: British working contracts were "hyper-precarious."
Yet another, François Lamy - who is a supporter of Martine Aubry, who introduced the 35-hour week - said that rather than comment, he would "prolong the Christmas truce and not say anything nasty about anyone."
