The press and media this morning are having a field-day rubbing salt into Ségolène Royal’s wounds. After a brilliant 2006, she has started the new year badly, and her popularity is slipping. Rumours abound: rifts within the Royalist camp, gossip about domestic tensions, dissections by learned psychologists about the unsustainable pressure on the male (François Holland) seeing his partner in the driving seat. Most of all, the press are piling on the agony after Royal’s forced admission that she and her partner own enough property to qualify for ISF, an annual tax levied on those with property worth more than 760,000 euro. Many old-school socialists claim they are scandalised, but really the whole story is being blown out of all proportion: the Royal/Holland couple are not rich, they have simply saved and spent wisely, thinking no doubt of their four children. But the response, as Jean-Michel Aphatie says, shows the French attitude to money: “In our country we stigmatise getting rich so much, we have thought so little collectively about how a society gets rich, about the creation of wealth within a society, that now we have the Holland/Royal couple hoist by their own petard.” Perhaps that’s why politicians’ exhortations to create a wealthy France get nowhere. François Holland himself has said on television “I don’t like the rich.” None of the above will, in my view, have any bearing on the election, but what must be most galling for Royal is that the so-called scandal broke on the web, the very same which so powerfully pushed up her fortunes last year. This year it could be her undoing. That is, of course, the curse inherent in the uncontrolled web: while citizens’ news and opinions spread like wildfire, so do scurrilous rumours and lies. If that sort of thing persists, it could discredit the whole idea of the web, leading to a back-lash, pushing power back firmly to the carefully controlled centre. Many political bloggers say their sites are being inundated with spam sent by angry socialist party members, getting their revenge for this property/tax story by “killing” the blogosphere.

All this media fuss is of course taking everyone’s eye off the ball. Ségolène Royal’s over-hyped problems are superficial compared to Sarkozy’s, which characteristically are not mentioned at all as he basks in post-coronation euphoria. But he would do well to spare a thought for those around him in his party. The day after Sarkozy’s coronation, prime minister De Villepin gave his new year’s wishes to the press. Last year you had to fight for standing room at the back, this year I could have brought the (extended) family. What changed? Very simple: he tried to reform one small part of France’s archaic employment laws, those dealing with first-time employment, so crucial, particularly for the dispossessed in the ghettoes. The man who thrilled us as, with Gaullist rhetoric, he defied Bush at the UN, is forgotten by those he sought to save. Defying America is a piece of cake compared with trying to reform France, even though everyone knows both need to be done.

Mais ce n’est pas tout, as my favourite TV presenter says. Sitting on Sarkozy’s right-hand is Alain Juppé, another prime minister who tried to reform France and for his pains was invited to inspect the inside of Matignon’s dustbins. Both men have cringed before their television sets, watching the rioting street mob baying for their blood. And then there’s the boss, Jacques Chirac, destroyed because he tried to get his compatriots to accept the European Constitution. Three extremely clever men (whatever one thinks of their politics) incapacitated by trying to make essential changes. I feel little compassion for them personally, but much for France, today whooping with joy because it fondly imagines that all its problems are solved, not by reform, but because it has the second highest birth-rate in Europe. A glorification of motherhood, with echoes of Pétain, as if finally French women understood their real role in life. But those 830,900 babies born last year are only going to make things worse! Each one, educated and kept alive at great public expense, is going to grow up into a rioting, cobble-throwing young person demanding nothing more adventurous than a secure, well-feathered job for life because that is his/her droit aquis. And as for being proud of now having a population of 63.4 million, they should contemplate De Gaulle’s wise words about the impossibility of governing a country of 368 cheeses.

Sunday is the day of Nicolas Sarkozy’s “investiture”, “dubbing”, “consecration” or “enthronement” as official presidential candidate for the centre-right UMP party. I’m deliberately using the words served-up by the French press, odd though they may seem to English-speakers, to show how the French themselves receive this event: it is a monarchic moment, full of echoes of the anointing of kings at Reims. However much M. Sarkozy may speak of “rupture”, continuity with the past runs deep. For Sarkozy, this wasteful (cost: 3.5 million €), technically unnecessary ritual (there are no other nominations for the job) in front of some 50,000 party members is almost more important than being elected president, for it means he has finally been accepted by his “family”, another word dear to the French, meaning all those who have been trying so hard to stab him in the back. The kind of family most of us would do anything to avoid. Their war-cry “Tout sauf Sarkozy” – anyone except Sarkozy – today rings hollow as, alone on stage, Sarkozy soaks up the adulation. But can it last?

I will admit that as a character Sarkozy fascinates me. In July 2004 I wrote a profile of him for Prospect, I think the first one for an English-language magazine, and I won’t repeat what I wrote there. But since his early teens he has had one idea in his head, to the exclusion of everything else: to be president. Ambition is too weak a word, he is obsessed with power. Yet his image of what power is seems at times childish – it’s a noisy, look-at-me sort of power, like today’s absurd extravaganza in Paris. It has to be bigger, brasher, bolder than the Socialist Party’s primary (which was genuine, with a serious choice between three contenders), with more people, better stars.

If he is elected president, he will become one of the most powerful men in the world. He will be difficult for other leaders to work with, for I believe he will enjoy throwing his weight around. But most dangerously for France, he is an angry man who sows discord everywhere he goes. Of course he has his ultra-loyal team, who have helped him get to his present position, but his past is full of treachery and betrayals – principally of those who cared for him most, his mentors Charles Pasqua and Chirac. His cartoon image, popularised by Le Canard Enchainé, is with two horns, a tail and a fork. He is not Mr. Nice Guy. “Use him as a doormat,” Chirac once said. “It’s the only thing he understands.” France needs reform, not revolution. Sarkozy wants the sort of adoration he’s getting today, with 50,000 people chanting his name: but in France adoration and reform do not go together. If, like Chirac, he wastes his time in the Elysée Palace, France will be badly off indeed.

He has enormous energy, the French call him l’homme pressé, speedy Sarkozy, but his energy is the fractious, disruptive kind, creating havoc and division in its wake. That kind of energy could rapidly become self-destructive during the election campaign. There are predictions of a major upset before the first-round vote, and despite the fact that his two closest friends, Martin Bouygues and Arnaud Lagardère, own and control much of the media, the febrile, over-ambitious and basically unloved Sarkozy is the most likely to give it.

All French politicians pay lip-service to the power of blogs. They fully understand, for example, that the 2005 referendum on the European Constitution was dominated and won not by TV homilies or newspaper editorials, but by a network of people outside politics connecting with each other and asking What is all this? Politicians now know they cannot live without the web, but at the same time they are fundamentally afraid of it – with good reason.

Ségolène Royal has used Web 2.0 more intelligently than her rivals in the race for the French presidency. A year ago she created a participative web-site, Désirs d’Avenir, inviting comments and suggestions, collaboratively writing a web-book with bloggers and encouraging each region of France to start its own Désirs d’Avenir web-site to discuss local problems. The party stalwarts in Paris pooh-poohed it all as gimmickry. The French public, however, found it was exactly what they wanted. Madame Royal’s popularity soared. At the same time, as Thierry Maillet points out, Ségolène Royal surrounded herself with women, and not necessarily women who had excelled at the schools of administration, but women who are good at marketing and communication. As a result, she amassed a huge following, mainly from the internet, and used that popularity to trounce the party stalwarts standing against her in the primaries.

So why did I say she is afraid of Web 2.00? Look at the video-clip at YouTube. It shows Ségolène Royal at a meeting of local party officials, announcing an idea which she does not want shouted from the roof-tops, “because I don’t want to be clobbered by the teaching unions.” Her “revolutionary” idea is that secondary school teachers must work their full 35 hours a week at school, not the “17 hours” which is “accepted practice (droits aquis)”. This will stop them sloping off to teach in private crammers (“quoted on the stock market”) – something Madame Royal finds outrageous. Her remarks caused nervous laughter at the meeting: teachers are to the French Socialist Party what miners, steel-workers and railway workers used to be to the old British Labour Party – at once a core and an un-reformable thorn in its side. They were shocked by what this video revealed – the gap between what Mme Royal declares in public and what she says in private meetings (shocked as well, of course, that they might lose a good source of pocket-money). But their anger was nothing compared to Mme Royal’s.

Such a security lapse will not be allowed to happen again – doubtless many French politicians wish they could take a leaf from China’s stranglehold on the net – indeed there has recently been a new spate of calls for regulation and control. But the whole point of Web 2.0 is that it is people talking to each other in public, beyond the control of those who wish to contain everything in rehearsed sound-bytes and carefully staged appearances.

At the last vote (the referendum), French politicians not only lost, collectively, but were all shown up for being out of touch. So how are they going to remedy that before the April elections? How are they trying to prove that, contrary to appearances, they are in touch with a large and probably younger section of French society? Ségolène Royal, as I have said, has a low-key, intelligent approach, creating a participative blog. However, it is running out of steam and now she is fully engaged on the “official” front, I wonder whether she will be able to keep the blog convincing. Her principal rival, Nicolas Sarkozy’s solution is typically American-style razzmatazz. His way of showing he’s part of the scene is to get one or several stars to come to a big public rally, and there they perform a variant of the medieval obeisance ritual: they approach each other on-stage and on-camera, one, by his body-language, clearly the presidential candidate, the other, despite being a star, doing a sort of mock-humility act which we know is temporary. They face each other stiffly and indulge in mutual jaw-holding (in France people do this where Americans hug and thump backs – anyway Sarko is too short to thump backs, his people must have told him that clamping people round the knees is not good for his “I’m your man” image). To show he is just a click away from the connected community he likes to have Loïc Lemeur, a (or perhaps the) key French blogger, beside him on stage at the big rallies, taking email reactions from people down-loading the podcast of Sarko’s speech. Loïc is quoted on BonVote as running the most influential of the 1,328 political French blogs. Sarkozy honed his web image by making a lightning appearance at Loïc’s recent Blog Fest in Paris, Web 3.0, organised with SixApart. Clearly he could not refuse the invitation to speak before web-people from 36 countries, but in the event he had nothing much to say, and left abruptly after his speech. He must have sensed something in the air, for many dismiss him on their subsequent blogs as irrelevant. In other words, like Ségolène Royal, he still has not really understood what it’s about. As Thierry Crouzet, a very astute, committed blogger points out, both Sarko and Ségo still see the world from the old top-down, command-and-control perspective which no longer fits with what many in France want.