French incredulous at idea of woman President

Shivers went down socialist male spines when Segolene Royal made her declaration of interest in the top job. Picture / Reuters

Michele Alliot-Marie says politics is not reserved for the boys.

If you were to put Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jacques Attali in a small room they would quarrel about almost everything.

The veteran far-right leader and the owlish former Mitterrand aide - now an all-purpose fixer and guru - come from opposite corners of the wrestling ring of French politics and life.

But the ultra-right nationalist and the socialist apparatchik do agree on one thing. Both say Segolene Royal will be the first woman to become President of the French Republic.

They are not the only ones to make such a rash prediction.

I attended a Socialist rally in Royal's home region of Poitou-Charente a couple of years ago. The hall, in the working-class town of La Couronne, throbbed with enthusiasm for "Sego", the elegant, cool, beautiful daughter of a right-wing Army officer.

The man next to me, a 50-something local councillor, said: "I have known it for a long time. People in this region have known it for a long time. Segolene will be the first woman to become President."

Why, then, has Royal's half-declaration of her possible interest in running for the presidency in 2007 ("Only if I am asked by the party ... only if the moment is right") generated such a cacophony of jeers and insults? Why have most of the insults come from within her own party?

As Angela Merkel inches nearer to becoming the first woman chancellor of Germany, French politics has been faced with a bizarre and disturbing prospect: a Madame Presidente of the republic.

It is not a prospect which appeals to the men, even the supposedly progressive.

Jacques Lang, the obsessively politically correct, 60-something former culture and education minister, said the presidency "should not be a beauty contest".

Laurent Fabius, former Prime Minister, mocked Francois Hollande, the Socialist Party's first secretary, Royal's "husband", and father of her four children.

Fabius sneered: "Maybe we should have a rotating husband and wife presidency. But who would look after the children?"

Although Fabius and Lang entertain presidential ambitions, that does not entirely explain or excuse their reactions to Royal's cautious statement in Paris-Match that she would run "if I am asked ... if I am best placed to help the party win".

The truth is that Royal's conditional declaration of interest in the supreme job in French politics has produced a chorus of gibes largely because she is a woman.

Royal, 52, said this week: "It is just as if any old 'he' has a right to say that they are ready to run, but no 'she' has that right. These comments do not reflect the opinions of the great majority of Socialist Party members ... The people who have made these remarks have insulted only themselves."

One Socialist politician who has abstained from jibes is Francois Hollande, 51.

He and Royal have lived together for 24 years. Their children are aged between 23 and 13. By her choice they have never married (and it's Hollande who cooks and shops.)

Unlike, say, Bill and Hillary, or Tony and Cherie, or Jacques and Bernadette Chirac, they are not a political double-act, in which the woman complements the man or emerges from the shadow of the man.

They are both successful politicians in their own right. Both preach a practical, moderate social democracy and both are ambitious.

But there could be a collision of interests. Hollande faces a struggle to keep his party together and hang on to his job after the Socialist Party split over the EU referendum.

He was taken aback by Royal's "declaration", which he rightly said was "not really a declaration".

The last thing he needed before a potentially bloody party conference in November was a row within the party about his wife.

So Royal's "non-declaration declaration" can then be seen partly as a warning to her compagne that she is not going to sit on the sideline forever. There have been rumours for weeks that all is not well between the two. Royal's supporters started a website in the summer - Segolene. 2007 - urging her to run.

Royal did not tell Hollande in advance what she was going to tell Paris-Match. On the other hand, she said she would never run for the presidency without the "support of Francois". Within a couple of days, it was the turn of the most powerful woman on the French centre-right, Michele Alliot-Marie, or Mam as she is usually known.

She said she also "hoped to play an influential role" in the 2007 race.

In 2002, Alliot-Marie was the first woman to become defence minister and is the first and only woman to lead a major French party. She reminded the two men jostling for the centre-right "nomination" - the Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, and the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy - that politics is not a two-handed game and not reserved for boys.

Mam's "declaration" produced no gibes on the centre-right, probably because she has little real chance of getting anywhere.

But Royal's "declaration" sent shivers down socialist male spines because she does have a chance - an outside chance - of taking the centre-left nomination.

She is the most popular socialist politician in France and a poll after her Paris-Match interview took her to the top of the list of socialist runners, alongside Lang.

She is one of the few Socialist politicians in France to talk convincingly of social and family "values", bridging the normal ideological gulf between left and right.

If she was a man, she would probably be the leading centre-left candidate. But because she is a woman, she is jeered by her own camp.

France prides itself on being a nation of social advancement, from the declaration of human rights in 1792 to the 35-hour week in 1998. Four in five French women have jobs, more than most EU countries, and they produce more babies than any other EU nation, save Ireland.

But France is also a conservative-Catholic, Mediterranean-macho country where women are kept in the background. Only 4.5 per cent of French company directors are women.

There has been, briefly and disastrously, one woman prime minister, Edith Cresson in 1991-92. But there are only 71 women in the Assemblee Nationale and 506 men. This makes France 74th in the league table of female inclusion in national politics, behind Iraq and Afghanistan.

French women had to wait until 1944 to be given the right to vote, 20 years after women in Britain and 10 years after women in Turkey.

France is not ready for a Madame Presidente, socialist officials say privately, excusing the reaction to Royal's interview. Paris may be ready. Other big cities may be ready.

But rural and small-town France, La France Profonde, is no more ready to vote for a woman for President than it is to vote for Bertrand Delanoe, the successful, moderate mayor of Paris.

Delanoe is the only senior politician in France to have openly declared himself a homosexual. He has been urged to join the lengthening queue of contenders for 2007 but he is said to accept that, outside the big cities, and in the south, his sexual orientation makes him unelectable.

So much for France as a nation of social advancement.

But is the only score against Segolene Royal the fact that she is a woman?

Royal is far from a typical socialist. She was born in Senegal into a military family of eight children. Her authoritarian father, who had risen from the ranks to become an officer, held trenchant right-wing and anti-feminist views.

Segolene, in revolt, declared herself a socialist in her teens and became a protege of Mitterrand and Attali.

At first her career prospered more than that of Hollande. She was education minister and health minister, espousing causes not popular with socialists, such as the struggle against pornography and prostitution. When Hollande became first secretary of the party in 1997, Royal's career stalled - Prime Minister Lionel Jospin did not like a husband and wife at the Socialist top table.

But when Royal captured the Poitou-Charente region, she relaunched her career.

Her supporters say she achieved her success by radiating warmth and talking about real problems, not abstractions.

But her many detractors in the party say she is at heart a cold and authoritarian woman.

Her critics say she has never held any of the large ministries of state and has never made a detailed speech on economic or foreign policy.

That's true, but equally true of, say, Lang, and no one in the Socialist Party suggested that he had no right to declare presidential ambitions.

The point is not that Segolene Royal is the perfect candidate for the Socialists and a shoo-in for the presidency. She is not.

The point is that she has earned as much right as other contenders to be taken seriously. It is the shame of France, and the Parti Socialiste, that she is being jeered because she is a woman.

- INDEPENDENT