Sego

Regulars to this blog (if there are any) will know that I am not a fan of Segolene Royal. Latest events have only confirmed my prejudice. You may recall that on the evening of the legislative election results on June 17, it was announced that she and her partner Francois Hollande had split up. Royal made the revelation herself in an interview with two AFP journalists. She told them that she and Hollande -- who is the head of the Socialist party -- were no longer to be considered a couple. She did not say when they had separated, but hinted that he had found another woman. The way she made it all public -- in the briefest of interviews -- implied that it was all a painful concession to the mediatisation of her life. In an ideal world, she clearly thinks, her private life would remain her private life. What portentous poppycock! It angers me the full angering that this woman came within an ace of being made France's president without ever once deigning to inform the nation about the state of her relationship with the leader of the Socialist Party. This was not some anodyne private matter. The guy with whom she did or did not share the marital bed was the head of one of the two great political formations in the country, with presumably rather strong views on current events. The country was led to believe that their 30 year relationship was just fine. But no! We were all wrong. They weren't together. There had been disagreements. They represented very different currents in left-wing thought. They were -- and are -- at odds. And this wasn't relevant???? It is doubly insulting that she chose to make the revelation the minute the electoral season closed -- maintaining to the end the hypocrisy that it was not the country's business. To think she could have been president!!!

It is only right and proper that with ten days to go before round one of the presidential election, I should stick my neck on the line and make a prediction of the outcome. So here goes. I think Nicolas Sarkozy will win by a bigger margin than people suspect. I think he will qualify without difficulty in round one alongside Segolene Royal, and in round two he will wipe the floor with her. Okay, I know -- all I am doing is repeating the polls. But there are plenty of people out there saying that the polls are themselves wrong. Number one of these people is Jean-Marie le Pen, who with some justification complains that his score tends to be undervalued. I take all that into account -- and I "persist and sign" , as the French say. Many people loathe Sarkozy, I know. They tend to be Paris bo-bos (affluent left-wingers) and anyone linked to the public sector. But here are two thoughts that make me think he's a sure-fire winner. One, when it comes to the vote, many people who have doubts about him are going to say "Fair enough -- you earned it". After all Sarkozy has had to fight his way to the top, taking everything his enemies could throw at him (and the enemies were not all on the left) -- but he never screwed up. There's been no terrible revelation, no massive gaffe -- even in the riots (so often thrown in his face) it is worth remembering that there was not a single serious injury among the rioters. Second thing, I reckon that the same phenomenon that underestimated the Le Pen vote now favours Sarkozy. There is a reluctance among some people to admit to voting for him, because still the word "right-wing" is seen as a little bit dirty. This is all conjecture. If it comes true, remember you saw it here first. If it turns out to be a load of old cobblers, well you'll forget it -- won't you?

It is surely the ultimate desire of every national leader: to be remembered in popular lore, to have one's name trip off the tongue two centuries hence in the same way we speak today of the Grand Old Duke of York. And yes, why not in a children's nursery rhyme? Jacques Chirac has been around so long that it has all come true. Every schoolboy and girl in the country today can reel off the following verse, to the tune of Freres Jacques.

Frere Jacques
Jacques Chirac
Ou vas-tu,
Trou-de-cul?
Je vais a la messe
Me laver les fesses.
Ding-dang-dong, ding-dang-dong

An alternative version has "draguer des gonzesses" in the penultimate line.
Okay, it's vulgar -- but it's posterity, innit.

(Translation: Trou-de-cul = arse-hole; me laver les fesses = to wash my buttocks; draguer des gonzesses = to pick up some chicks)

Following ia a broadcast on Ireland's RTE radio, which I thought deserved a second outing:

In the Asterix book Obelix and Company, there is a character called Gaius Saugrenus. He is a brilliant young Roman technocrat who has the inspired idea that the best way of beating the last Gaulish redoubt is to corrupt it with money. He starts buying up quantities of Obelix's stone menhirs, Obelix is transformed into a ruthless capitalist -- and for a time the sky really does look as if it's falling on their heads.

Gaius Saugrenus eventually gets his come-uppance of course, and he ends the book in disgrace. Which is a fate not shared by the man on whom the character is modelled. Because look hard at those enthusiastic, chiselled features -- strip off the toga and put on a suit -- and who do you see? It is, of course, the young Jacques Chirac -- back in the mid 70s the epitome of youthful technocractic energy, and already ... French prime minister.

This introduction is by way of a reminder not just of the sheer length of Jacques Chirac's monumental career, but also of how at the start he was seen as a vigorous can-do kind of man, brimful of ideas on how to modernise society and the economy. Fresh out of the elite national administration school ENA, he had his first job as an adviser to prime minister Georges Pompidou in 1962.! He was a minister in 1967 and prime minister in May 1974, when Sugar Baby Love by The Rubettes was number one in the charts and Liam Cosgrave was Taoiseach.

After that it was mayor of Paris for 18 years, prime minister again in the 1980s and then -- capping it all -- the 12 years as president that will come to an end in May.

What did Jacques Chirac have that made him last so long? The answer is two things: likeability and luck. No-one dislikes Jacques Chirac. When the dour leftwinger Lionel Jospin was Chirac's prime minister, he was infuriated that several socialist cabinet members starting visibly warming to the president, simply because he was so affable. A poll shows that Chirac is the poltician most of the public would like to have dinner with.

He has a big appetite, he likes patting cows' bottoms, he is unintellectual, he talks in flowery vapidities -- French people love that kind of stuff. And he's lucky: never more so than in 2002 when -- an unpopular sitting president -- he was re-elected with a record 80 percent of the vote because his opponent in the run-off was Jean-Marie Le Pen.

What Jacques Chirac did not have -- contrary to the early dynamic image -- was any considered idea of what to do with the power he was so good at acquiring. The man they once dubbed Chamelon Bonaparte flipflopped like a bream on a griddle. Once he loathed Europe -- now he's a breathless cheerleader; once he was a Thatcherite, then he discovered the "social fracture"; once he exploded atomic bombs in the Pacific, then he became a Green. With each shift he went on telly and spoke with such utter conviction -- mes chers compatriotes, he'd begin -- that somehow he got away with it.

But many would say -- and I agree -- that his have been wasted years -- a mere continuation of the Mitterrand period, with debt and unemployment and low growth now compounded by the grumbling tremors in the banlieues.

When the Asterix book ends Gaius Saugrenus has hooked the whole of Roman society on Obelix's menhirs, offering subsidies which he can't remove, as Rome plunges into economic crisis, because of the fear of public protests. As chance would have it, Chirac leaves a country that is also labouring under a growing debt burden -- and if there's been no reform here it is also not least because of a congenital fear of "the street". But of course, for all Goscinny and Uderzo's uncanny foresight, the parallel ends there. Because if Gaus Saugrenus got his come-uppance -- fed to the lions by Julius Caesar -- somehow Jacques Chirac never got his.

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Francois Bayrou

Could this be the face of France's next president? It is a perfectly possible scenario. Francois Bayrou is now nipping at the heels of Segolene Royal in the first round of the vote (on April 22). It is perfectly possible to see him qualifying for round two against Nicolas Sarkozy. And what would happen then? All the left would rally round to "keep out Sarko" and the far-right would feel no inclination to help him. Sarkozy would be toast. So President Bayrou it would be. Is that good? Is it bad? Who the hell is this guy? Bayrou is a veteran figure of the political centre-right, who has brilliantly manged to pass himself off in this election as a rebel against the system. It is a ludicrous notion, because his party -- the UDF -- has been in more or less permanent alliance with the RPR/UMP, and Bayrou himself serve four years as education minister in the early 1990s. His greatest asset is that he is a man of the provinces. He grew up on a farm in the Bearn (see earlier blog), and worked originally as a Classics teacher. The oft-repeated story is that he mastered a delibitating stutter by constant practice in front of a mirror -- an early sign of his fierce will-power. His greatest problem is that he has no political party of any size. If he is elected, what happens then? In June the country votes for a new parliament, the theory being that the just-elected president gets a nice majority to work with. But where are these hundreds of Bayrou-ist MPs suddenly going to come from? The UDF has just 30 deputies, the rest having defected to the UMP five years ago. A president Bayrou could well end up with a parliament evenly divided between Socialists and the UMP, which would be a recipe for paralysis. That, or a majority for one party or the other -- which would mean more "cohabitation", and Bayrou relegated to a secondary role inside the country. So believe me: it is not a good idea. Bayoru is a nice man (though the one time I met him he had terrible halitosis) but the idea that he represents some radical alternative is perverse. People respond because the chimaera of national unity is always appealing. But it is doomed to fail.

Could the British and French prime ministers be related? Wandering around Montparnasse cemetery, I stumble across a tomb belonging to the Galouzeau de Villepin family -- ancestors of the Matignon smoothie. Intriguingly, on the tombstone are just about decipherable the words -- Baron de Blair. All I can find on various genealogical websites is that a certain Marie-Eugenie de Blair, daughter of the Scottish Baron Blair -- married Francois Galouzeau de Villepin, who was Dominique's great-great grandfather. Trouble is -- there are vast numbers of Scottish Blairs. Too much to hope that Tony is a descendant of the baron. But still, it would be rather a nice coincidence for the two soon to be ex-prime ministers to be distant cousins. Remember -- you saw it here first.

For the first time since he was first touted as a future president, I am having doubts about Nicolas Sarkozy. Not about his capacity for the job, but about his ability to get it. A week ago Segolene Royal was invested with the socialist nomination for the presidency after a campaign in which she convincingly saw off two more experienced rivals. The country loves her. She looks great, she says things which people understand and she is a woman. Above all she has stolen from Sarkozy something which he thought he had coined for himself: the idea of "la rupture" -- or a clean break. Sarkozy's difficulty is that while he represents rupture with pain, Royal's version is rupture-light -- a cosy, non-divisive, unconfrontational variety. Guess what the people will prefer on Aril 22. On top of that Sarkozy is now the victim of a blatant campaign from the Chirac clan to cast doubt over his presidential bid. Even though he is by miles the leading right-wing contender, the Chiraciens are sniping from the sidelines, hinting at an alternative like de Vilepin, Alliot-Marie or even Chirac himself. They must know they do not stand a chance, but still they seem bent on wrecking the Sarkozy wagon. These are tough times for "le petit Nicolas". I reckon that the Chirac camp wants to provoke him into some kind of an explosion, which they can then say shows his unfitness for the job. Sarkozy already has a highly-strung personality -- can he ignore the goading?

Are we seeing the first signs of weakness in the otherwise faultless performance of Queen Sego? Maybe it's just me, but it's possible we'll look back in a few months and say October was her high-point. What gives me the feeling? Some of the stupid things she has been saying. The latest is her idea for "people's juries drawn by lot" before whom members of parliament will have to "rendre ses comptes". Something about that makes me very queasy. You don't have to go as far as Max Gallo did (the left-wing historian said the idea was practically Maoist) to feel that there is something deeply troubling about a politician who is so beholden to the "people". The "people" are always right. That was what Robespierre used to say. The other day Sego was asked about her policies to Turkey and its bid for EU membership -- a very important issue in France. She had no opinion. She was with the "people". Whatever they decided. You could trust the "people", she said. Sego has an inner cabinet of advisers who are cooking up this stuff -- convinced that Internet, designer clothes and the occasional "pavé dans la mare" (paving stone in the puddle) of Socialist thinking will see her to victory. So far you couldn't say they are wrong. She is a long way ahead of her two rivals (Strauss-Kahn and Fabius) in the polls. But things will change after she gets the nomination next month (assuming she does). She deserves a rougher ride, and she'll get it. By the way for a good political blog ahead of the elections, check out Christophe Barbier at Le Point.

Just back from Soissons, a town about 60 miles northeast of Paris, for a look at the Sego phenomenon. Segolene Royal is on phase two of her bid to become France's first woman president. Phase one was becoming a media star. That is in the can. Now comes the task of winning the Socialist nomination. I think she is a shoo-in. They loved her up in Soissons. Maybe that is too strong. Many in the audience of Socialist activists were frankly suspicious of her "liberalism". But even these sceptics said they would vote for her. Why? Because she is a woman, because she is new, and because she can win. Think of all the ambitious local politicians who dream of being swept to office on her coat-tails. They know they won't stand half as much chance behind some old bore like Jack Lang. So if you ask me ideology will go out the window, and they'll pick their meal-ticket. The staggering thing about Sego is that she really is stunning to look at. Imagine a hall full of sturdy locals from the Aisne department: all five-foot-nothing in supermarket jeans, and dumpy ladies in flowery tops. In walks this veritable looker. She is like a willow in a stunted hedgerow. As the man next to me said - I know I'm not supposed to say it , but she is beautiful -- and it does matter." By the way look in on Sego's doings at her website www.desirsdavenir.org

Alain Duhanmel must be eating his hat. The best-known of France's political journos wrote a book at the start of the year on the "presidentiables" -- i.e. those leaders who stand a realistic chance in the 2007 elections. He mentioned several leading Socialists, but deliberately omitted Segolene Royal -- who was at the time beginning to emerge as a possible candidate. Asked why he left her out, Duhamel said he didn't take her seriously: she had no programme and no "team" inside the party. Six months later this looks absurd. "Sego" is a million miles ahead of the other Socialist candidates -- all the old "elephants" like Fabius, Jospin, Lang and Strauss-Kahn. Poll after poll shows that she alone has a chance of beating Nicolas Sarkozy in the run-off. Socialist insiders find this very awkward. They mistrust Sego as a media creation, and fear she's running a personalised campaign that will make the party itself irrelevant. Their suspicions have been confirmed by her recent pronouncements -- attacking the 35 hour week for example, and backing boot camps for young hooligans. On the other hand if she represents the best opportunity for winning, then maybe it would be just plain stupid not to support her. Things are going to heat up over the summer, and then at the "rentree" campaigning will begin for the Socialist nomination. The 200,000 card-carrying members will be called on to vote on who they want to carry the Socialist banner. In normal times, the rank-and-file follow one or other of the party "elephants." Can they bear to swallow their ideological pride and vote for a woman who deep-down they despise as a lightweight? We shall see.