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PARIS - Rebuffing suggestions that she should plant her flag on the centre ground in the battle to become France's president, Socialist candidate Segolene Royal has unveiled a strongly leftwing programme with the focus on welfare and the idea of "citizens' juries" to monitor Parliament.
Royal announced a 100-point "presidential pact" to 15,000 Socialist Party delegates in Paris, promised a raft of measures for the poor and vulnerable, including a 5 per cent boost to pensions and a rise in the minimum wage from €1250 ($2500) a month to €1500 ($3000) "as soon as possible in the next legislature".
She set the target of 120,000 new homes for the poor every year, declared local councils should have the right to requisition properties that lie empty for more than two years and called for negotiations to "consolidate" the 35-hour week, an initiative that has been criticised as being ruinously expensive for the French economy.
One of Royal's most contentious proposals is for "citizens' juries" to monitor the National Assembly in order to extend "participative democracy in the community".
"Politics will no longer be carried out without you, the people," declared Royal.
"Today, I want to restore hope and courage to the weakest. I say to all that the time to show daring and imagination has come. I will forget no-one, because France, in order to recover, needs every man and woman."
Other ideas include imposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies, sending repeat juvenile offenders to military-style boot camps, government regulation over bank charges, setting a 20 per cent target of renewable energy resources as a share of national energy needs by 2020 and creating a "public energy pole" of the two state electricity and gas giants, EDF and GDF, which had been edging towards privatisation. Children would start school at the age of 3, instead of at 6 today.
"As a mother I want all the children who are born and grow up in France to have the same as my own children," said Royal, a mother of four and graduate of an elite school.
Royal's manifesto is the result of three months of "consultations", conducted over the internet, at party level and in thousands of meetings around the country.
Royal, 53, is in desperate need of a boost. Her chief rival, conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, leaped out of the starting blocks last month with a sharp-edged, well-organised campaign, while she has made gaffe after gaffe and the Socialists have been weakened by internal squabbles. At the end of last year, opinion polls showed her with a lead of one or two points over Sarkozy; now she trails by between four and six points.
On the right, her opponents blasted her manifesto as demagogic and catastrophic for the French economy.
"For an hour and a half, she itemised measures that will cost billions and billions" of euros, said Economy Minister Thierry Breton of Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) party. Far rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who could well play a spoiling role in this election as he did in the last vote in 2002, said the juries "remind me of the Commune", a bloody revolutionary uprising in Paris in 1871.
France's president is elected for a five-year term in an office that wields enormous powers. The first round of the election takes place on April 22. If there is no outright winner, the vote goes to a second round on May 6.
