November 15, 2006
Ségolène Royal and her rivals
We should know by late on Thursday night whether Ségolène Royal has got the Socialist nomination for the French presidency. Party members are voting all day Thursday and the polls close at 22.00.
A few months ago Ségolène (everyone seems to call her by her first name now, like Oprah) was thought to have it in the bag. But she had a tough time in the candidates’ debates with Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius, and the last time I checked with the FT’s Paris office, they were refusing to predict whether Ségolène would get the 50 per cent of votes she needs to clinch the nomination. If she falls short of the 50 per cent threshold, it goes to a run-off on November 23. And that would give the “anyone but Ségolène” camp a chance to rally against her – as well as puncturing her aura of invincibility.
It still seems hard to believe that the French Socialists would do something as stupid as rejecting the one candidate they have who seems to have a genuine chance of winning. Dominique Strauss-Kahn would be a particularly odd choice. Not that I have anything against him, I’ve met him a couple of times and I thought he was charming and clever. But he is also a Euro-fanatic – which would make him an odd choice given that France voted down the EU constitution only last year.
Strauss-Kahn also had his reservations about the draft constitution – but only because it was not federalist enough. (And I know there is an argument that this is why France voted against the document, but I don’t buy it.) The first time I met him, he was in Brussels hawking around his own constitutional plans – which were effectively a blueprint for a federal state. He has always got on particularly well with the Germans. The German government had, in fact, been slightly nervous when Strauss-Kahn was made French finance minister in 1997 because he is Jewish, and they thought he might have a few issues with Germans. But in fact DSK speaks fluent German (which apparently he learnt from the nanny, when growing up in Morocco) and he disconcerted his own French officials, by chatting to his German counterpart in German – a language that the French officials did not speak. All very laudable – but I still think it would be odd to choose a Euro-federalist as a presidential candidate, at this particular moment in French history.
Laurent Fabius – who is generally expected to run third – takes the opposite tack on Europe. He campaigned for the No in the referendum and probably hoped that he would gain some momentum in the presidential race, as a result of having made the right call. But people seem to find his re-invention as a man of the hard left unconvincing – and rightly so. Fabius was always a slightly unlikely socialist in the first place. He used to be the epitome of a “moderniser” – a man who had abandoned the ideas of the hard left many years ago. If you met him in person and didn’t know who he was, you might mistake him for an investment banker – from the perfectly-cut suits, to the smooth manner and the fluent English. Like Strauss-Kahn, he is Jewish – which casts an interesting light on the argument that France is somehow endemically anti-semitic.
Ségolène has much less international experience than either of her rivals. A French friend of mine chaperoned her around London last year, and was surprised to find that it was Ségolène’s first trip here for many years. Given that London is just a two-hour train ride away from Paris, that strikes me as a mite parochial. Her English is also less than fluent. My friend saw her give a talk in English and says haughtily – “It was like watching a child try to speak English, it was embarrassing.”
Oh well, we’re still not quite at the stage where you need to speak fluent English to be elected president of France. I know it’s ill-advised to make a prediction when I could be proved wrong so quickly – but I think Ségolène will win on the first round. And then lose to Sarkozy in the election for the presidency itself.
I would be curious to hear your arguments as to why “it would be odd to choose a Euro-federalist as a presidential candidate, at this particular moment in French history”. If, as you seem to agree, France voted against the EU Constitution because Europe is not anymore a cause that gets automatic, knee-jerk support from the French population and if you consider the EU as a rather positive development in the history of Europe, why would it be better for a Euro-sceptic to accede to the Presidency than for a Euro-enthusiast who might actually explain to the French why Europe matters (in contrast to Chirac who did not and who is the main culprit for France’s rejection)?
Posted by: Philippe Wacker | November 16th, 2006 at 12:02 pm | Report this commentMore fundamentally, if Fabius as a Jew was good enough to be Prime Minister, why would it be a problem for Strauss-Kahn to be President, even from a German perspective?
If you honestly compare your own views to those of the three candidates, I bet that you will end up nearer to DSK’s than Fabius’ or Segolène’s. Why do you then find it necessary to pour cold water on DSK?
Your position does not appear to differ in essence from the mainstream media who do not analyse and compare on the basis of merits, but who simply find a match Sego-Sarko more fun than a match DSK-Sarko.
I often read your column & blog with high interest, but I have to admit that I find your comments about DSK highly puzzling…
Finally, your bet that Sarko will ultimately come out on top of Sego is very risky. It might be the best option for France, but France is a country that has seldom known what is best for it…
Here is a Frenchman speaking.
Isn’t the problem that nobody knows what Royal stands for except for her own self-promotion (not surprising, par for the course for a politician). Though Strauss-Kahn has tacked with the party wind, one knows where he stands from his time in government, wanting to wrench the part from Marxism to Social democracy (German echose here, too), Equally, Fabius has laid out his platform with sometimes embarrassing clarity, but, though he finished last, his score still shows the residual strength of the old leftists.
Posted by: Jonathan Fenby | November 17th, 2006 at 4:39 am | Report this commentRoyal? It’s all smiling confusion between old and new left, adopting the model that Swedish voters rejected, promoting trade unionism, getting teachers to work harder, cracking down on errant youths etc etc - none of it amounting to anything remotely resmebling the platform the French left needs. But I guess that is the point; she couldn’t have got where she is today if she had been clearer and if she had not had the backing of the 30 per cent new PS members. The only benefit would be if she takes on DSK as prospectve prime minister and he can ram some sense into the PS programme before next spring.
Two interesting comments on Ms Royal, I thought - all the more pertinent, now she has made it.
I agree with Jonathan Fenby that her programme - such as it is - seems to be all over the place. This is obviously offensive to the Socialist old guard who are accustomed to the idea that you have to have written a serious book, before you can be taken seriously. In an ideal world, perhaps they would be right. But in placing image above substance - at least for now - Royal is merely mvoing French politics in line with the rest of the western world. And I think over the course of a full campaign, a really content-free candidacy would in fact be exposed. I was interested incidentally that an FT story showed that 40% of Royal voters were motivated by the fact that she is a woman - which fits my own nascent theory about the feminisation of politics, outlined in Saturday’s FT.
As for the comment on DSK…What I was trying to argue is not that France needs a Eurosceptic president, but that it might be slightly odd to elect a man who is much more ardently pro-European than the constitution that French voters have just rejected. And as for DSK as a Jew and a presidential candidate; the reason I mentioned it was not to suggest that he could not be president as a result. On the contrary, it was because I remember the outcry in recent years in the US in particular about alleged French anti-semitism. In that context, I thought the fact that DSK and Fabius both made serious runs at the presidency, was an interesting counter-indicator.
Posted by: Gideon Rachman | November 22nd, 2006 at 11:48 am | Report this comment