“If Nicolas Sarkozy is elected in a couple of weeks, we shall have no excuse.” Thus writes former socialist prime minister Michel Rocard in Friday’s Le Monde, calling for an alliance between the Socialists and François Bayrou’s UDF party. As one of France’s elder statesmen, he sees nothing to stop the two parties joining forces - their policies on employment, housing, debt, education, Europe are essentially the same, he says. Well, not really. But the very fact that Rocard feels he has to say this shows how weak he believes the socialist position to be. He clearly believes that on her own Royal will not get into the second round and that if Bayrou gets through he will not necessarily hold out a hand to her. Better, says Rocard, to cement an alliance now. On Sunday Bernard Kouchner, another experienced socialist politician, founder of Medecins Sans Frontiers and Head of the UN administration in Kosovo in 1999, agreed with Rocard that an alliance is the only way now to save the socialists from a second defeat in a row.

Ségolène Royal immediately brushed aside any chance of rapprochement; initially Bayrou said he was pleased, that Rocard’s suggestion confirmed Bayrou’s main argument that to pull France out of its crisis the best of both left and right have to come together. Then this morning on the radio Bayrou changed his mind, saying it was too early to form an alliance with only the left. The UDF’s position was to be independent of both major parties and he could not suddenly join one or the other.

On Sunday, just one week from the first round vote, three polls showed Ségolène Royal climbing again, taking votes apparently from Bayrou, so maybe she is right and does not need that helping hand. But Sarkozy is still well in the lead and might still get a majority in the first round, which would cancel the second.

Rocard and Kouchner are not the first socialist heavy-weights to jump ship and swim to the centre. Presumably they feel that if Royal wins they will not get a look-in, so they may as well go to Bayrou who, if he wins, will be desperately looking for people to form a government. But their public defection has not caused much damage. It’s an fascinating aspect of this election that none of the oldies, left or right, carry any weight with the voters. As if the older and more experienced you are, the less people want to listen to you. In that sense there really has been a break.

The campaign enters its third and final phase. All the candidates are declared, they have all expressed their policies. They each know their rivals’ strengths and weaknesses, now it is a matter of convincing us that they are better than the others. A study showed recently that only 35% of the electorate are die-hard partisans of one party or the other, sure of voting the same way they have always voted. They rest wait to be convinced.

What is strange, for an outsider, is to see the political fragility behind all but the UMP candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. This election is about voting for an individual not a party, but the political mess behind two of the principal candidates makes people wonder whether and how they will be able to govern. Take Segolene Royal, for example, the Socialist candidate: you only have to watch the leader of her Party, Francois Hollande, to realize that all is not well. He travels about the country addressing crowds, but nobody much takes any notice, wondering why: they don’t want him, they want to see the candidate, they want to touch the hem of her skirt as she passes, or be touched by her in some way. The leader of the Socialist Party is seen and treated as an irrelevance in this election.Francois Hollande is in a doubly odd position in that he is the father of Segolene Royal’s children and her party’s leader, yet there appears to be no rapport between Royal and Hollande at either level. They live separately, a very knowledgeable MP I talked to at length on Friday continually referred to Royal as Hollande’s ex, yet in the book she publishes this morning she tries to scotch that rumour by waxing lyrical about her love for Hollande and how much he supports her. But she doesn’t convince: “I realize that the situation is unusual,” she says, ”and I understand that it makes people curious. But outside the fact that it is my private life [which the French press does not talk about] I can, even so, tell you one thing: I find my children absolutely amazing. They support me, each one in his or her own way. Francois too.” A sort of appendage to her domestic thought as he appears to be in her political. But it’s very important, for how will she run the country if she has in two senses broken with the party leader, who is, one assumes, the party’s figure-head and principal policy chief. It is no secret that Hollande is far closer to the party elephants than Royal, yet to form a government she must rely on them. There was a much-publicized moment a week or two back when she went back to them, but they did nothing for her ratings so she moved away again, trying to recreate the excitement she generated last year. Voters are human beings, most have had to cope with relationship problems, work problems, they project their worries on to the candidates and ask perfectly normal questions such as Can it work? They also know that, under the 5th Constitution, the president of France is one of the most powerful positions in the world, the candidate has to be 100% convincing.
Francois Bayrou in the centre is the other candidate who fails to convince partly because of the political uncertainty behind him. Like Royal, what he stands for is perfectly fine, interesting and in its own way workable. But what about the rest? He at least is the head of his party, but he has a only a handful of MP’s. He needs 290 to have the slimmest majority in parliament. He talks blithely of working with the best on the left and the best on the right, cynically assuming that today’s rivals will drop their life-time allegiances in order to have a piece of power. He’s a clever man and he knows his colleagues, so he is probably right, they will, but it says little for them if the offer of a ministry will make them change their convictions. Will the public believe them in their new role? And how long will their conversion last? The point is, Bayrou has four weeks to convince us all that it’s possible. He really has to sell that as a water-tight workable proposition. Knowing how volatile and Machiavellian many French politicians are (compared to their rather staid British and American counter-parts), I think many doubt his capacity to hold them together. He is an interesting man, with good ideas, probably better than his rivals’, but he is not a born leader – in many ways like Gordon Brown.
That leaves Sarkozy. He is the leader of his party, which is huge, well-financed and solidly behind his ideas. He has the backing (albeit tepid) of Chirac, which most of us would consider a curse rather than a blessing. But interestingly with Sarkozy, while the party’s policies are reasonable, many consider the man is not. He is divisive, he rules by division, he makes more enemies than friends, whom he uses only for what they can give while they can give it. The same MP I was talking to on Friday, who knows Sarkozy well and is not entirely against him, said that if he is elected the country will be on the rocks within two years. Sarkozy’s ideas are not his own, he takes them from anyone who seems interesting, which means that he changes them the next time he meets an interesting person. He thinks that leadership is rushing about at top speed, gesticulating, shouting. He is intensely disloyal – one only has to look at the man who guided him successfully to where he is now, Brice Hortefeu, who a month ago was put firmly in a cupboard to which only Sarko has the key. It is precisely this histrionic and unpleasant behavior amongst the entire political class which the French want to change. They want their politicians to deal with (which means cure) the problems facing France – its massive debt, simply paying the interest on which (40 billion euro a year) soaks up all income tax and costs more than the entire education budget; unemployment; pensions; immigration and its corollary, integration; globalization which terrifies the French but is a fact of life; religion, which to everyone’s surprise has become an issue after 100 years’ lying low. The list goes on and on, but the candidates have less than 4 weeks to address them. Many voters feel that in the last two and a half months they have not even started…..which means they may give up in disgust before voting day.

Ségolène Royal has seen the light; she is returning to the roots of her popularity, going back to the mass of French people who want something different. Last year she literally swept to victory in the Socialist Party primaries because she tapped into the grassroots. Virtually unknown in a party dominated by heavy-weights like Fabius, Strauss-Kahn, Lang and even the retired Jospin, she used the internet intelligently and built on her experiments in participative budgeting in the region of which she is president, the Poitou-Charentes. She promised a break with the past. Thousands joined the Socialist Party specifically so they could vote for her in the primaries, and with their help she crushed the party elephants, who had not minced their dislike, or disgust towards her “half-baked” policies. Then she seemed to flatten out. Worried, she felt she needed the rock of socialist support, so she went back to the same elephants who had rubbished her and whom she had soundly beaten. General consternation from those who thought they saw in her a breath of fresh air, not more of Mitterrand, whose sole lasting legacy, according to left-leaning editorialists on the tenth anniversary of his death, is that he became president. So far he is the only socialist president in 49 years of the 5th Republic.

So it is with great relief that Royal has begun declaring that she is a free woman, her ideas are her own, and she has started talking again about people’s juries, the internet and those policy elements which put her on the electoral map in the first place. However flakey they may seem, they at least correspond with what her supporters want. She is now talking once again about having a 6th Republic - Arnaud Montebourg’s idea. But in doing this she is walking away from the Party, who admit in the press they had no idea she was going to bring that issue back on to the agenda. This morning they are all starting the old carping. They have support in their criticism from the party’s former advisor on economic affairs, Eric Besson, who suddenly resigned in February because Royal was taking too many liberties, announcing policies which had not been discussed or even mentioned in the all-important committees. His book, Que Connait Madame Royal? is full of quietly administered vitriol, he gives succinct extracts in an interview with Le Monde . His principal criticism is that she is interested only in herself.

But far more interesting to outsiders like myself is this underlying desire amongst the French voter to break the established pattern. In itself their search for something new is not new. Since 1981 no government has been re-elected, in other words the electorate try something, find they don’t like it, and vote against next time. They chop and change, rejecting everything they know: in the first round of the last presidential election, Jacques Chirac, who they knew only too well, did not even get 20% of the vote - that means just 14% of French adults. Whereas the marginal candidats, lumped together, beat him with 29.64%.  But of course, they were not lumped together.

Is the underlying reason for this the pensée unique? The feeling that the people who govern France all say more or less the same thing? That is certainly Le Pen’s view, and to an extent Bayrou’s; It used to be Royal’s, and maybe she is coming back to it. The old chestnut that the leaders of France, both in government and in industry, left and right, have all been through the same, very narrow school, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. That certainly seems to explain Bayrou’s immediate rise in popularity when, last September, he started having a go at the French media for the way they don’t give air-time to anyone except their own. This popular desire for change, and at the same time to bust things open like the press and the elite, shows the revolutionary spirit is still alive in France. Ségolène Royal seems to have re-understood that, and quite rightly she is using the internet as the vehicle to build on that spirit of revolt. Those who doubt the influence of the web in the campaign can, as always, go to Thierry Crouzet’s blog. It is this element of the unknown, the ever present risk of something quite unexpected (April 2002, May 2005) which makes this election particularly fascinating to follow: it is an unfolding narrative without an author. We all know it will end, and quite soon, but no one can say quite how.

If a week is a long time in politics, ten days is an eternity. I have been rushing round France interviewing Marine Le Pen and her father Jean-Marie, then writing about the Front National for Prospect Magazine, at the same time setting up a documentary film about the role of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, France’s post-graduate school for high-flying administrators. Something had to wait, and it was the blog. I shall return to both these subjects at a later stage, but first try to get back into the election.

A milestone in the campaign has just passed: the 16th March, the day when each candidate had to present his or her 500 signatures to the Conseil Constitutionel. For the minor, independent candidates it is of course an important day, but for most of us it is a totally trivial event - simply because it is such a strange and in many ways unnecessary ritual, over-blown by the press. Most candidates, major and minor, have already been campaigning hard for two and a half months, one has sold his flat to raise funds for his campaign, all have invested enormous time, energy and naturally money. Then, as from today, some 35 candidates are told they have wasted their time, energy and money - and our time too – they must pack up their campaign stall with nothing to show for their effort.

The idea of getting 500 elected representatives to endorse a candidate is to prevent loonies standing for president. But why shouldn’t a loony stand if he or she wants to? Oh, because it dilutes the vote – instead of voting for sensible candidates, people will vote for loonies. Ummm – what? That says something very strange indeed about either how the elite see their compatriots (“they are so stupid they can’t tell the difference between a loony and me!”) or the quality of the serious candidates. The British parliamentary elections have, over the past 40 or so years, had candidates for totally impossible parties – such as Screaming Lord Sutch’s Monster Raving Loony Party. They attract a few votes, they lose their deposit and have no effect on the final result. In other words if an eccentric no-hoper is going to campaign for two and a half months, why not let him/her continue for just the remaining month and be done with it? Or prevent them standing at the outset.

Anyway, the day is past and we can get on with looking at the main candidates, who had no problem getting their signatures. François Bayrou has been climbing vertiginously close to Royal and even Sarkozy, but may have stalled. From the outset he has presented an intriguing programme, a Third Way in all but name. Both his main rivals have resorted to some pretty lousy tactics to discredit him. These are candidates who at the outset declared themselves to be a new species of politician, not wrapped-up in petty sniping and back-biting. But despite such good intentions, nothing much changes: the Socialist Party is, as always, riven by egos as their leaky ship lurches dangerously and threatens, like last time, to sink. Two of Ségolène Royal’s key advisors, Laurent Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, denounce each other in public, which bodes well for any government they might eventually form. Meanwhile Royal’s former economics advisor has published a book telling us what a self-centred, unappealing person the Socialist candidate is.

The UMP camp is little better: Sarkozy with much pomp brought on board the venerable Simone Veil, former minister of health way back in 1975 (again, this is the man who said he would break with the past). After a public show of hugs, kisses and mutual congratulation, Mme Veil has more recently attacked her new leader for proposing a ministry of immigration and national identity. It is well known that Sarkozy has a terrible temper, sometimes hurling furniture across his office at his luckless assistants, that sort of thing. Recent reports abound of his screaming at his staff, calling them all the names under the sun because he is slipping slightly in the opinion polls and Bayrou is closing in. Again it bodes well if he elected president: it also says a lot about a man (or woman) if he blames his staff for the fact that the public are losing faith in him.

Bayrou still provides the enigma of the election. Is his popularity going to last another 36 days? It’s far from certain. In the last presidential elections Jean-Pierre Chevènement had a similarly heady experience, rocketing in the opinion polls during the campaign, but thenflopped terribly at the actual vote. People notoriously give deliberately misleading answers to pollsters – it’s all part of the fun. Anyway, a third of the French electorate cannot take part in these polls because they don’t have telephones – and all these polls are done over the phone. People either no longer have a fixed-line phone, depending instead on their mobiles, or their fixed line is for the internet only. So that at least provides us with suspense until the last minute, for always, in the background, is Jean-Marie Le Pen, who in 2002 surprised/shocked everyone by beating the Socialists. There is no reason why he should not do the same again. I spent a very interesting hour with him in Strasbourg last week: he was charming, witty and seemed remarkably full of energy for a man of 78. His policies, well, they please some and listening to him it is not hard to understand why. They follow a certain logic which is either yours or isn’t. But more of that, and his daughter, another time.

Ségolène Royal continues to lead her faithful back into the woolly depths of Old France. Having begun her campaign surfing on a wave of enthusiasm generated amongst the principally young blogging community, and used their votes in the primaries to defeat the ancient elephants of the Socialist Party, she yesterday confirmed the massive U-turn she initiated in her policy speech of the 11^th February. That major statement marked a return to the style and values of François Mitterrand, who came to power 26 years ago. Yesterday she went further, nominating her “new” team, consisting almost entirely of 13 figures from the past – most of whom have spent the past year telling everyone how awful she is. Her credibility plummets. Most disappointing of her choices is former prime minister Lionel Jospin (only a few months ago particularly vitriolic about her), who successfully led the party to crushing defeat in the last presidential elections. That the Socialist Party is doing badly in this election is very largely due to the fact it has failed to create a fresh identity for itself in the intervening 5 years. Royal’s initial call that she was going to change France, now, ten weeks away from the vote, rings sadly hollow. Change is indeed what France needs – I don’t mean only reforms, but a change of heart. Travelling round France last week, everyone I spoke to had the same message: they have had enough of the present bunch.

It looks as though Royal got her timing sadly wrong. Presumably she made her trunk call to the ancient elephants last week, when her ratings were dropping, despite (or because of) her February 11th policy speech. But at the beginning of this week she made a very impressive television appearance, on her own, and her popularity over the last couple of days has been rising again - but too late to cancel the call for help from her former enemies. That mis-timing may prove fatal.

Apart from anything else, Royal’s about-face bodes ill for the future if she is elected president. The incumbent is known as the weather-vane, changing direction with the slightest breeze. She seems ready to follow that tradition faithfully. Certainly nobody voting for her would know quite what they were endorsing – a new-look France embracing the 21^st century or more of the mid-20^th century dogma of control by state and unions.

A week is a long time in politics and I have been away from my blog for a week – researching a documentary film about power in France. During that week, Ségolène Royal collapsed a bit further in the opinion polls, was given up for lost by many commentators but, since her television debate on Monday, has started to climb again. François Bayrou has continued his steady crawl upwards, but is still way behind the main two and for Sarkozy it has been yet another week at No.1.

80% of the electorate say they are still undecided, nevertheless there is something very odd about Ségolène Royal’s campaign. A year ago she was very much an outsider. Then, thanks largely to her use of the internet and participative debates, she rose spectacularly to be elected Socialist candidate last November, convincingly beating the old guard. Since then, as we all know, she has disappointed. But, given the way our democracy works, by definition a swinging pendulum, she should have been the front-runner from the outset. For although Sarkozy has distanced himself from Chirac, he is nevertheless identified as Chirac’s successor: he is president of the party Chirac created, he has been a minister in Chirac’s government for 5 years: despite himself he carries the can for the terrible five years at least of Chirac-inspired failings. Even though he wants a change, with his control of the media and so much else in France, Sarkozy represents the current rulers, so in our democracy it would be natural for him to go, as the pendulum swings left. But no. With the campaign now well established, he is ten points ahead of Royal.

Why is the electorate showing so little enthusiasm for the Socialist candidate, particularly one who is not associated with the policy failures of Lionel Jospin? As Françoise Fressoz says in Les Echos, Royal has learnt from Jospin’s mistakes in the 2002 elections, unlike him she spends enormous energy listening to people and then creating policies from a synthesis of what they say. Her problem is that as yet she has not managed to imprint these on the collective consciousness. She has also failed to decide on the Socialist Party’s identity. So she falls back on tired socialist mantras, but even so, tired mantra-repeating socialists like Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius refuse to show the slightest flicker of enthusiasm for her. Nor do any of the newer, social-democratic European socialist parties. Last week her economic advisor walked out. It is no secret that Royal’s team do not get on at all with the official Socialist Party – whose president is Royal’s partner. But Royal needs them, not for their ideas but for their weight and logistics – she is not going to win this election without them. But they are not coming towards her, rather they seem to be leaning towards François Bayrou.

Meanwhile, as the possibility of Bayrou’s becoming president gains ground (the latest IFOP poll says that if he makes it into the second round, he will win it) so the glaring weakness of his position is becoming apparent. Who is he going to ask to form a government? He has let it be known he might ask a Strauss-Kahn-like figure to be prime minister. But within weeks of his election there will be the parliamentary elections: while the presidentials are about individuals, parliamentary elections are about parties. Can Bayrou’s UDF party field enough candidates to constitute a majority? No. So if the Socialist party does well, what kind of mess will that make? The Socialist president, François Hollande (Royal’s partner), would become prime minister, elbowing out Bayrou’s choice, and he will appoint his team of ministers, with whom Bayrou will have to work. If the right-wing UMP do well, Bayrou will have to work with Sarkozy as prime minister. By voting Bayrou you are inevitably voting cohabitation. Bayrou himself has said that he wants to rule with a national union, but to be credible he would have to have enough senior politicians from the left and the right commit to him (by leaving their own party) before the election, so his voters know who they are voting for. Yet if he does that, he will also alienate some – who like him but don’t want to be governed by a Strauss-Kahn or a Jean-Louis Borloo (currently with Sarkozy).

Sunday 11^th February was the date Ségolène Royal set to pick herself up, shake herself down and start all over again. After rocketing to success throughout 2006, to be overwhelmingly elected the socialist candidate in November, she went into a stall throughout December and January. She said she was listening to her compatriots cries of despair. Her compatriots, losing faith, said she has no ideas. The 11^th February was the day she fixed to convince the world that she is right.

Her initial instinct to listen to the electorate was a good one, it marked her out from her predecessors and some of her rivals. But her second instinct seems to me highly dubious. Rather than continue to surge forward with new ideas and new technology to conquer new voters, she decided to fall back on the methods used by Mitterrand in 1981: in January of that year he announced his 110 Propositions, in February 11^th of this year she has announced her 100 propositions. Today’s speech was written for her by Erik Orsenna, one of France’s most distinguished writers, but too well-known as Mitterrand’s speech-writer. Copying Mitterrand to that extent, falling back on things that worked 26 years ago, is a misjudgement. Surely? Particularly since Mitterrand’s 110 Propositions, having got him elected, notoriously failed him miserably in practice. Two years into his presidency he realised his nationalisation policies were leading France to ruin, increasing unemployment and the national debt. In 1983 he had to devalue the franc and operate the infamous U-turn which alienated millions of his supporters, who still feel betrayed. Surely Royal can’t want to tread that same path? Yet having worked so hard to throw off the heavy-weight “elephants” of the Socialist Party, exactly those people who had worked under Mitterrand, having succeeded in doing that against all odds, her first independent gesture is…..to fall back under Mitterrand’s shadow. It’s a quality I mentioned the other day: seeing the future through the eyes of history, of using history as a small child uses a security blanket. Objectively, Mitterrand was an extremely dubious figure but his shade holds a large part of France in thrall.

What are her 100 propositions? For French readers, Royal’s own site is the best place to see them. Clearly no one can make 100 propositions that are all going to be water-tight – notice she does not call them promises. Generally speaking the smaller the proposition the more sensible it is, and the more likely to be adopted – at least for a while. She wants to prevent the accumulation of mandates – that is, prevent an individual being at the same time a mayor, sitting on the regional council, perhaps being the regional president and being an MP, minister or senator. She also proposes preventing one person or group owning and controlling several branches of the media. She also wants to allow foreigners who have been full-time residents for at least 5 years to vote in local elections, by which she presumably means regional and general (departmental) councils.

Some of the propositions are based on her own experiments in the region over which she resides: people’s juries to watch over elected representatives, participative budgets in local affairs. Anything local, it seems to me, has a greater chance of being adopted.

But most of her propositions are too vague to convince any but the most naive: “To put in place an industrial policy capable of preparing the future and reducing the risk of off-shoring by creating a National Agency of Re-industrialisation.” Or “Reform the State: a euro spent must be a useful euro.” Many were already on the Socialist Party’s programme, wooing the left with promises to scrap last year’s labour reform which helps small business, and with a certain sad inevitability the State must still meddle in the way managers do their job and risk-takers are rewarded: “Companies will be charged a lower rate of tax if profit is ploughed back into the company and a higher rate if the profit is given to share holders.” Exeunt omnes.

She makes a number of guarantees, which almost by definition are untenable non-starters, for example that absolutely everyone will be guaranteed a lifetime’s housing security, or that no young person will be out of work for more than 6 months, or that those made redundant will be kept on 90% of salary, guaranteed by the state for a year. Does that apply to the nefarious bosses to whom José Bové referred, who are “making 300 times the minimum wage”? That is 4.5 million euro a year. Will she pay them 90%?. She also promises to increase the minimum wage, increase pensions and “consolidate the 35-hour week”. I have not read any proposals about reducing France’s colossal debt.

Any candidate faces that unanswerable dilemma: do I thrill the crowd by promising the moon? Or do I remain sensible and perhaps bore? François Bayrou has chosen the second option, refusing to make any promises since he recognises the impossibility of knowing whether he will be able to carry them out. Royal has taken the Sarkozy route: pile up the promises, treat the electorate as suckers. Of course some are; those who are voting for the first time have every right to expect that things will be different. All of us at 18 were certain that it was our generation that would finally change everything, that we were heralds to a new era. Hélas!

Will this work? Last night, five days away from finally unveiling her presidential policies, Ségolène Royal makes a major speech in front of some 5,000 supporters in Paris , with a string of PS elephants sitting on the front row. The woman who has made so much of participative democracy, who has used the web to open up discussions with a wide public, launches straight into: “The French people want a choice based on a clear cleavage. I have decided to take on this cleavage, for it opposes two conceptions of society, two ways of governing, two visions of France.” France split in two again, pitting one person against another, oh dear: “France is not the synthesis of the Ancien Régime and the Revolution….It is the clean break made by the Revolution which explains today’s France…” Does she believe that? She has only to look at her principal rival’s chief adviser to know that’s not true: François Bayrou’s long-time adviser is a certain Charles de Courson, who comes from one of France’s oldest families, a brilliant enarque but set against elites of any sort, whether ancien régime-based or ENA-made: he epitomises the best of the old and the new. But Madame Royal wants to see what is not there, a clean break. More ideological conflict when ideologies no longer work. And she then procedes to make a traditional left-wing speech, going into the history of the left, quoting all the 19th and early 20th century greats as if society had remained static all that time. Looking at the future through the eyes of history. It is a peculiarly French habit: very often, interviewing someone about why they think such-and-such or adopt a particular policy, they begin their answer by saying “The way to understand this problem [anything from immigration to the internet] is to go back to Robespierre’ speech on the 19th May…….”

But the problem of France’s clivage is more pressing. Many of us had hoped that by listening to a wider public the socialist candidate would broaden her own policies to admit the multi-faceted nature of today’s problems and appeal to the people of France, rather than just to the committed left. It’s the complexities of today’s society she should “take on”, not its cleavage. But no. She has decided to make the inter-party fight her campaign, not the future of France. I imagine Sarko’s boys are rubbing their hands with glee, for in a straight fight against their implacable machine Royal has very little chance. Her better hope was to engage people right across the spectrum - since there are many on the right who are wary of Sarko. Blair’s third way, to mention the unmentionable. But no. Left versus right, punch for punch and large numbers of voters switch off, cynical and disillusioned.

This week’s “Canard Enchainé” (no link because the Canard does not have an on-line edition) has a nice piece comparing the socialist French presidential candidate with Hillary Clinton. Both women prefer to make important announcements on the internet: Clinton that she was going to run for presidency, Royal her New Year’s wishes to the nation. Like Mme Royal, Mrs. Clinton invites internet users to take part in an important conversation on the future of the country. Like the French candidate, she has an assortment of elephants in her cupboard, old party stalwarts whom she has to accomodate. Both have a senior party figure who has “retired” from political life, but who threatens to come back and mess up their chances: former vice-president Al Gore for one and Lionel Jospin for the other. Hillary Clinton talks of 30 years fighting on behalf of children - Royal made her reputation in France as junior minister for schools education and then as junior minister for the family and childhood, and as for foreign affairs, Mrs. Clinton has said she will go on a trip to China (Royal has just come back) to defend the rights of women. Both women believe in strong moral values - Ségolène Royal annoys many French socialists by talking about l’ordre juste. And, says the wicked Canard, both are landed with a partner who is a senior party figure with a lot of clout but who is nevertheless “encombrant“. Someone who has undoubtedly helped them get where they are but with whom they might, in their heart of hearts, wish they were not quite so closely associated.

We used to wonder how, if elected, John Kerry would get on with Nicolas Sarkozy: the thought of Hillary and Ségolène having a cosy gossip in the Oval Office is even more intriguing - but not worth speculating about…..

There’s a video going round the (French-speaking) net at the moment, which illustrates well the role the internet is playing: yesterday Ségolène Royal was reminded in a radio interview that if she is elected president she becomes head of the army. She was asked how many nuclear submarines France has. She dithered a while and hazarded a guess. One? No, said the interviewer: Seven. Have a look at the video, which has the radio interview on the sound track while we watch images of massive destruction. But, as Thierry Crouzet says, there absolutely no reason why one person should have all the answers. Do we like her more because, like us she’s fallible? Many French people say that being president is closer to being god. But the more I study these elections, and hear what some French people expect from their president, the more I feel their expectations are over-blown. When the 5th Constitution was written in 1958 one man could somehow take it all on (not because issues then were less complex), but now we are all better informed, by our education and by the internet.

The row rumbles on about Ségolène Royal’s remarks in favour of independance for Quebec. On Tuesday evening she repeated them loud and clear on Europe 1, a French radio station. Ten minutes ago the internet version of Le Monde published an interview with former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, who says: “On matters of Canadian unity I cannot remain silent….I am very disappointed by Mme Royal’s remarks on such a delicate and deeply Canadian matter. It’s an unforgiveable mistake, probably linked to inexperience……Those who do not have the vote in Canada should not interfere with Canadian affairs.”

According to a blog on Le Monde’s site, M. Chrétien has just been invited for dinner by Sarkozy’s UMP!