CHIRAC, SARKOZY The French Right prepares for presidentials

Better, much better, but probably too late. France's would-be first woman president, Ségolène Royal, impressed many viewers with a feisty and eloquent performance in a televised debate watched by 20 million people on Wednesday night. But the Socialist candidate may not have done enough to redeem a previously muddled and error-strewn campaign. The centre-right candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, still appears to be heading for a clear victory on Sunday.

A danger to democracy?

France has to decide for or against Ségolène Royal - but her TV debate performance has raised questions about how she would govern.

May 4, 2007

Who would have thought it? The French Socialist party, due by the electoral cycle and the feebleness of the Chirac administration for a big presidential win, are provided with a perfect target in the shape of Nicolas Sarkozy. They have a big pool of centrist voters from the first round on which to draw. The rightwinger is a sitting duck for accusations that will rally a majority for a new republic. It should have been, as I wrote on the night of the first round, a referendum on le petit Nicolas.

Instead, after Wednesday night's televised debate, what France will be doing on Sunday is to vote for or against Ségolène Royal. Her partisans were, naturally, enthused by her performance, seeing her as a new Joan of Arc, leading them against Anglo-American-Sarkozy liberalism. But opinion polls show him as the big winner among viewers. Today, she is lagging nine points in the main survey just published.

On the highly emotional theme of education for disabled children, she was shown to be not only wrong, but also, possibly, practising extreme economy with the facts.

The programme to get handicapped children into "normal" schools, which she launched while in government under Lionel Jospin was, indeed, halted, as she said by the centre-right government that took office after the Socialists were beaten in 2002. But what she did not say was that another programme was launched to achieve the same end. Latest figures from the Education Ministry show that 160,000 handicapped children are now in "normal" schools. The total under her programme was 90,000.

For her to flare into righteous anger on the point and denounce Sarkozy as an immoral liar indicates that either she didn't know what she was talking about or that she did know the facts and was consciously misleading viewers in an exercise of decidedly old politics. Sarkozy's advice to her to calm down was, as it happens, very much to the point. The accusation that this was patronisingly male supremacist is risible. As so often during the campaign, she makes an assertion and then casts anybody who argues with her to the outer circles of Hell.

That, as Socialists who have worked with her have told me, is par for the course. There is the Royal line, and nothing else. Big ideas, but no detail, and no implementation programme. Gut appeals from above, rampant popularism. Stalinism reborn from Poitou-Charentes?

Fine, if that's what you want, but there are three questions:

1) Is this the way to produce lasting change, or would her election bring a re-run of the post-1981 Mitterrand debacle, that sowed so many of the seeds of France's current problems?

2) Does the left really want a president who combines petty politicking with the assumption of the high ground on the basis of what seems to be either ignorant or a straight lie?

3) Does France want to be led by somebody who cannot land a killer blow on the ultimately vulnerable Sarkozy, with his Le Pen-style garb, but adopts his law-and-order rhetoric from 2002, echoing the old parachutist to the point of ridicule?

The Socialist militants celebrated with Royal at the mass rally in Lille last night. But, dare I say, there was a totalitarian air to it. By contrast, Sarkozy seemed like political business as normal in Montpellier.

Royal has made her choice. If she wins, she will - rightly - exult. The danger for her is that, for a majority of non-committed voters, she will have managed to make herself appear an even greater danger to democracy than her opponent. Adopt Mitterrand, Jospin, Royal, reject Rocard, Delors, Strauss-Kahn - why can't the French left find the plot?

As a result, France faces a choice between a dodgy rightwinger and a candidate who, some of her admirers on Cif have suggested, should be compared to Joan of Arc - a lady with mad, heavenly voices in her ear and an overwhelming urge to annihilate the enemy. Royal's debate offensive has left only one choice on Sunday for those who will vote. Expect a big increase in abstentions over the first round from those who can't stomach Sarkozy. Suddenly, unless you are a paid-up Royal voter, you begin to tremble at how she would govern.

This weekend, she is the issue. Brilliant politics from the right. Highly peril from the left - after all, Joan of Arc died at the stake.

........said Kaambi Mze Soilihe, .........from the island of Comoros, a former French colony off the southeast coast of Africa.

"Nobody is against security and safety in this neighborhood -- we all want it -- but Sarkozy wants only repression."

Tony Essono..... said that despite years of anger and discrimination, people in La Courneuve were willing to put their faith in the ballot box "because they understand they can change something" by voting. But, he added, "if Sarkozy is elected, it means we haven't been heard, and we'll trash everything."

This is great - democracy is good, but if we don't win we plan to riot. Ms Royal knows her public really is neo-Stalinist!

Anti-Sarkozy feelings run particularly high in La Courneuve, where 56 percent of the 35,000 residents live in public housing, and the streets are filled with people in traditional African, Muslim and South Asian dress. Sarkozy's posters have been defaced with swastikas, and several people interviewed, including Calina, described the candidate as Hitler-like.

You may well be right about antipathy for a woman President, but you know you are wrong about the social democrat policies that have infected France for years.

*Jospin only, if I remember correctly.

Mitterand was a member of the French Communist Party for many years, though he had let his membership lapse by the time he ran for President.

... ... ...
As Interior Minister in Pierre Mendès-France's cabinet (1954-1955), he was faced with the launching of the Algerian War of Independence. He claimed: "Algeria is France." He was also suspected to be the informer of the Communist Party in the cabinet. This rumour was spread by the former Paris police prefect, who had been dismissed by him. The suspicions were dismissed by the investigations.

you know you are wrong about the social democrat policies that have infected France for years.

Walter is quite right to comment on this.