Ségolène Royal, the first woman with a chance of leading France, began reshaping her campaign on Monday as she faced a run-off with the clear favourite in the presidential election, the right-wing former interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
Royal began the difficult task of convincing France that she was not merely an off-the-shelf traditional Socialist in designer clothing and could break away from her party roots to capture the centre ground.
With the candidates racing to win over the seven million people who voted for the centrist third-man François Bayrou, party advisers said Royal would stand no chance of winning if she fought a traditional socialist campaign of ”left versus right”. Instead, she set out to reassure the centre ground she could be all things to all people; to prove, despite her critics, she could reinvent the nation.
The 84% turnout, the highest since 1965, would give any winner a mandate for change in a country plagued by unemployment, debt and social unrest, where voters are keen for renewal. Sarkozy’s score of more than 31,18% was the highest for any right-wing politician for three decades. Socialists hailed Royal for her 25,87%, the highest for a left-wing politician since François Mitterrand in 1988.
But the total left-wing vote in France was the lowest since 1969. The other six leftist candidates, whose votes are expected to transfer to her camp, polled less than 11%, providing Royal with a very small reservoir to draw on at the May 6 run-off.
A map divided
The map of France was on Monday carved up with a vast swathe of the eastern half bright blue for Sarkozy and pockets of the west and south-west red for Royal. The Socialist came first in only a handful of mainly rural regions. Even on her home turf in western Poitou-Charentes, where she has led the regional council since 2004, she just beat Sarkozy by about one percentage point.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the German Green MEP and hero of Paris’s student protests in May 1968, said a left-wing campaign would be ”hopeless” for Royal. He held crucial talks in the early hours of Monday morning at the Socialist party headquarters to convince Royal, whose campaign has been a mixture of left-wing economic policy and conservative social values, to move away from the traditional left. He told the Guardian: ”If she tries to play it on the traditionally socialist card, she will lose, because France has veered right.”
He said she must convince France she would change the way the elitist political class govern. She must also show she would push through change by acting as a mediator between politicians, unions and street protesters and that she is unafraid to update France’s social model.
”It’s not a case of stopping people taking to the streets. There will always be street demonstrations in France. It’s genetic, it’s part of democracy. The key question is getting beyond that confrontation and reforming the country.”
France’s presidential elections have traditionally been won and lost on the centre ground. On Monday, Sarkozy ventured to secure that ground. He attempted to counter critics who call him scary and dangerous and steal Royal’s claim on the ”mother of the nation” figure by visiting a women’s shelter whose residents included illegal immigrants, a group he has previously targeted in a crackdown. ”I want to take charge of suffering,” he said. ”A country, for me, is like a family.”
Royal said she is ”a free woman” and emphasised the idea of ”an impartial state”, her code for a France for all.
Nicolas Sauger, a political analyst, said Royal also has to convince the nation she is not the hesitant, incompetent party outsider her critics describe. He said it is crucial to hammer out policies that fit the centrist vote, such as a pro-European message with a promise of a referendum on any new constitution. She also has to pick up Bayrou’s quest to reform French democracy.
France’s public debt, now at 66% of GDP, is crucial to the centrist campaign and Royal is likely to increase calls to curb spending deficits.
But in a campaign focused on personality, Royal faces a difficult fight. Even socialist voters on Monday said they were let down by her speech after Sunday night’s results, appearing stiff, wooden and uncomfortable. She is often accused of having a grating voice.
Sauger said: ”Her problem isn’t really one of policies; it’s one of image, how she communicates.”
The fight for Bayrou’s base
Royal has 13 days to do the impossible. The 9,5-million votes she won were respectable and better than polls indicated. But that still leaves her nearly two million votes short of Sarkozy. She is even further behind if the 16-million right-wing votes cast are compared with 12-million left-wing votes, about 35% of the total.
Royal is unlikely to take more than four million of the 6,8-million centrist votes for Bayrou on May 6, so she needs votes taken from the far right Jean-Marie le Pen.
Pollsters were divided on Monday on how the 6,8-million people who voted for Bayrou would divide between Sarkozy and Royal. CSA said that 45% of Bayrou’s vote would go to Royal and 39% to Sarkozy, with 16% abstaining. Ifop disagreed and said most of the party would return to its conservative roots.
Bayrou has not said which way he wants his party base to go. There is little love lost between him and Sarkozy, and his UDF party is formed largely from the centre-right who were repelled by Sarkozy’s manner and more right-wing measures.
Much of Bayrou’s campaigning in the last days was aimed at Sarkozy. But Sarkozy has always kept a door open to Bayrou’s voters. The big turnout for Bayrou also included leftwingers disillusioned with Royal’s centrist policies. Bayrou will want to keep together his party base to allow him to form a credible challenge in 2012. — Guardian Unlimited Â