Ex-beauty queen to run for French presidency

Eva Joly has one of the most extraordinary CVs in world politics. At the age of 18, she was a Norwegian beauty queen. At 20, she was an au pair in France. At 37, she was a feared French investigative magistrate.

This week, at 67, she was elected candidate for the Green-Europe Ecology party in next year's French presidential election.

To the delight of some and the dismay of others, she has become the first person with dual nationality to run for the presidency.

Joly, who became a successful magistrate investigating political and business corruption in France in the 1990s, claimed another high-profile scalp. The primary election for the recently expanded Green party was supposed to have been a coronation march for the handsome, charismatic TV presenter and ecological campaigner Nicolas Hulot, 56.

Instead, the second-round results showed a 58-41 per cent victory for the small, blonde woman with a Norwegian accent.

Joly trounced Hulot partly because she ran a tougher, more focused campaign, close to the left-leaning, anti-establishment views of the old French green party, "Les Verts".

Hulot had been touted as the candidate to help the Greens break out of their militant ecological ghetto. But he was rejected by a majority of members of the Green-Europe Ecology party - and massively by the original "Verts" - because he has a consensual, non-confrontational approach to environmental problems.

"The ecological party has decided to deprive itself of a candidate who symbolises the environment to millions of French people," said Green Euro-MP Jean-Paul Besset. "It's called shooting yourself in the foot."

Having reinvented herself so many times, Joly must now prove that she can reconstruct herself, once again, as a politician. The signs are not good.

Joly tends to lecture audiences in a droning monotone. She treats TV interviewers as defendants in a legal investigation. She seems to be personally engaged only when she can link ecological issues to her own area of expertise: the fight against corruption in high places.

But it would be foolish to write off Joly's chances of expanding the green vote beyond its core of 5 to 6 per cent in the first round of the presidential elections next April; she has proved herself formidable.

- INDEPENDENT