The Woman Who Would Be France's President

By James Graff

Segolene Royal knows how to attract a crowd. When she walks into a meeting of France's Socialist Party, her mere approach is enough to cause a stampede of camera-wielding, sharp-elbowed journalists, who brush aside Royal's rivals for the party's presidential nomination. As she glides through the crowd, Royal, 53, coyly appeals for decorum. "There should be some constraints, some respect for modesty," she coos in a smoky alto. But the hint of a smile on her lips betrays her: she's loving it. And why not? So blinding is Royal's star wattage that her opponents seem feckless in her wake. "They're not campaigning against a person," sighs a top aide to former Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn, her main party rival, "but against a phenomenon."

Royal defies easy categorization. She's a devoted mother of four who never married their father and a political progressive who talks of family values, law and order, and the virtue of discipline. Although a card-carrying member of France's political elite, she has cultivated a populist image by canvassing the opinions of ordinary citizens, whom she calls the "legitimate experts" on France's problems. In person, she listens with the prim attentiveness of a Catholic schoolgirl. Yet she has no false modesty over paparazzi adulation, shrugging at photos of her in a bikini that caused a stir this summer. As she says in an interview aboard a train between Poitiers and Paris, her two main political bases, "Why should one have to be sad, ugly and boring to go into politics these days?"

French voters seem ready to find out. Polls show Royal leading the field of prospective candidates for next year's presidential election, which could make her the country's first female head of state. (In May 1991, President Franc,ois Mitterrand appointed France's first and only woman Prime Minister, Edith Cresson--and tossed her aside in less than a year.) Royal still has to take on France's hoary political establishment, which isn't quite so ready to yield to her popularity. French political parties remain clannish, ideological nests dominated by their male leaders. "All the polls show French society to be very open to the idea of a woman President," says Franc,oise Gaspard, a feminist sociologist and former Socialist deputy. "But the political parties are still very archaic, controlled by men who can't stand the idea. The fact that Segolene is no longer acting as a 'comrade' but as a rival is completely astonishing for them--and completely insufferable."

Royal's own party has been keen to remind her that it isn't yet her race to lead. Socialist Party members won't choose their standard-bearer until November. Although Royal's momentum is growing, she is bound to face some nasty challenges from within the party before then. Royal is by far the most popular of the left's possible candidates and perhaps the only one who can beat Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the likely presidential candidate of the conservative Union for a Popular Movement. Royal has avoided squabbling with party rivals--an indication, her campaign advisers say, of her determination to speak directly to the general public. She says her goal as a politician is to help people "construct their lives and the happiness of their loved ones."

Balmy lines like that one are evidence of what sets Royal apart from other French pols. Royal readily acknowledges that her positions would have less appeal if they weren't being laid out by a woman. "It's a symbol of change," she says. "Where men have failed, people think, O.K., maybe we'll try a woman." Stephane Rozes, one of France's most respected pollsters, says, "She is popular because she's a woman who has a nondoctrinaire stance toward politics. People see her as out to solve problems, while so many others, most of them men, are stuck in the fog of ideology."

Royal is also willing to capitalize on her pulchritude. "Her strategy, which she exercises with no scruples, is one of seduction, and that's a new thing in French politics," says Regine Lemoine-Darthois, co-author of a recent book about women of Royal's generation titled An Age Called Desire. "She holds up a mirror to French women that they find very agreeable: to knock men dead while being a woman of power. She's proof that you don't have to abandon your femininity to make it." At a campaign meeting in Paris earlier this year, a man told Royal she looked good. "You're not too bad yourself," she retorted, bringing down the house.

To her opponents, such tactics mask an ideological emptiness that will show up sooner or later. "Technique doesn't replace politics. There have to be ideas, convictions, a discussion of the stakes," says former Prime Minister and two-time presidential candidate Lionel Jospin, whose disdain for Royal's approach led him to challenge her for the party nomination. (He withdrew from the race last week, removing a major hurdle for Royal.) An adviser to Strauss-Kahn issues a similar criticism: "What the polls measure is popularity, not competence. Socialists have a furious love of debate, and she's not debating. What does she think about debt, about foreign policy, about economic governance? You've got to talk about this stuff. And you can't talk to party activists like you do to public opinion."

Royal believes that by downplaying ideology, she can attract voters from across France's political spectrum, including former party loyalists who stayed home or drifted to the fringes in the past election. "To win in 2007, the left has to get votes everywhere, even from the [far-right] National Front," she told TIME. "There are 30% of leftist voters who vote for the National Front because they're exasperated--they're in unstable jobs or insecure neighborhoods. Rather than worrying about the center, the left had better work on this working-class constituency, which is casting protest votes for extreme candidates because it is suffering."

Royal knows how to play tough. Born in Dakar, Senegal, the daughter of a French army officer, she grew up as the fourth of eight children in a large house in Lorraine. Her father's regime was a strict one (the family intoned Gregorian chants on Sundays). Royal attended a Catholic boarding school and the University of Nancy before attaining the classical educational polish of the French political elite: a degree from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris and another from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), where her class included the current Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, and her partner, Socialist Party secretary Franc,ois Hollande. She met Hollande there in 1978 and had their first child in 1984.

After ENA, Royal joined Mitterrand's staff, and in 1988 he encouraged her to campaign for the National Assembly from a southwestern rural district. She held onto the seat in three elections and in 2004 beat the conservative incumbent to become president of Poitou-Charentes--the only woman to lead one of France's 26 regions. She has also been a central government minister--first with responsibility for the environment and then for schools, where she pushed to give parents a stronger role in the education system, passed new laws to deal with bullying and pedophilia, and made the "morning after" pill available in high schools. As France's first Minister of the Family, from 2000 to 2002, she was responsible for laws introducing paternity leave and recognizing the right of divorced fathers to play a larger role in child rearing.

She still faces a long road to the Elysee. Royal is hoping that Jospin's withdrawal will clear the way for her nomination, but that result isn't guaranteed. "The right is more or less in marching order," she says. "Everyone should get behind me instead of trying to destroy me." Her supporters leave little doubt as to what their attitude would be if party elders connived to derail her. That, says Delphine Batho, a member of the party secretariat and a Segolene supporter, would be "just one more time that a woman has been blocked because men don't want her to succeed." Royal, say her aides, is ready for the challenge. "They're all waiting for her to crack up and start sobbing," says one. "There's nothing worse for these guys than a woman who's not fragile. And she's not, believe me." That's good. Because to win France's presidency, Royal's resilience will matter more than her high cheekbones.

With reporting by Jeffrey T. Iverson/Paris