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In French election, a cowboy and a swan
The top two candidates have captured the public's imagination, and are nearly tied in polls with two months to go.
from the February 15, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Focus on Sarko-Ségo, but 12 running
Despite media focus on the Sarko-Ségo race, as it is known, some dozen candidates are vying. The April 22 first round, for which candidates rally to gain support from the core of their parties, will reduce that to two. Then in the two weeks before the final vote, the candidates must deftly switch gears and appeal to a far broader range of voters.
François Bayrou of the center-right Union for French Democracy party has risen slightly as a dark horse. France votes roughly 60 percent on the right, and 40 percent on the left. Yet right parties are more divided with the nationalist Le Pen polling 10 to 15 percent.
Skepticism and distrust were high among more than a dozen everyday Parisians interviewed by the Monitor, most of whom are still undecided.
Indeed, mollifying rising frustrations among the French seems key to the election. There's palpable unease here, a sense that not only is the character of the country changing, but that the famed "good life" is uncertain. A huge segment of voters depend on overloaded or rigidly state-controlled jobs or services. Affordable housing seems distant as real estate costs and rents rise. Schools are crowded; gaps are widening between degrees earned and jobs secured. Social security is debt-ridden.
"There's a feeling that France is on the edge of something, its position is not good, and the future isn't clear," says a political advisor to a top French minister. "Many people think, 'France doesn't look like what I knew from the past,' and think, 'I don't know what it will be for my children.' "
To be sure, the election does relate to French pride and France's position in the world. Recent presidents such as François Mitterand and Mr. Chirac have cut a wake on the world stage. The current dozen candidates have not gained such gravitas in the French mind, and have yet to live up to the French expectation that "they have the shoulders for the job."
"We need to imagine a candidate that can go to the US and talk to the president," says Demi Chaldo, an assistant in a Paris law firm, "We want someone with scope, who knows the job, but is not an elite. So it is paradoxical for French people."
A 'bigger revolution than 1789'
Royal has captured the imagination of the overseas media here. As John Kirby Abraham, a 40-year resident and former British reporter argues, "Can you imagine the Republic of France with a woman leader? I think it could be a bigger revolution than 1789!"
Yet many French, despite loving Royal's glamour, are also often shrugging their shoulders over an American infatuation with Royal, which they view as misunderstanding the way French politics works.
"Sarkozy wants to take the country out of its sloppiness," says Guillaume Parmentier of the Center for America and Transatlantic Relations. "The election will be over whether people want painful change, Sarkozy, or the appearance of change, with a woman, Royal."
Royal herself, a lifelong socialist who worked for Mr. Mitterand in the 1980s, has been undergoing intense scrutiny. Prior to Feb. 11, her campaign was entering dangerous waters.
At the New Year she was the front-runner. But ironically, on trips to the Middle East, China, and Canada designed to give her some international heft, she made a series of gaffes. Perhaps the most serious in the French mind came in China, where the daughter of a nation that champions the rights of man praised the Chinese justice system for its speed and efficiency.
Her push to be a Tony Blair-style reformer inside the Socialist party, and to move the party toward the center, was attacked by the intellectual left. Sources who know Royal say that by taking over the Socialist party with her domestic partner François Hollande, by introducing reforms, and by creating an innovative Internet registration rule last fall that gave her the nomination – she is a proven political heavyweight.
Yet by Feb. 1, Sarkozy was leading in the polls. Royal's Feb. 11 statement may have stabilized her. Sources say that Royal has shifted to the harder left, partly to isolate and dramatize Sarkozy as a rightist.
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