Ségolène Royal is approaching a crucial moment in her campaign. According to one poll she has slipped 3 points against Nicolas Sarkozy and according to another she has lost 8 points to him in a month. Her now established habit of making naïve remarks about other countries is diminishing her in the eyes of her compatriots: only now 29% say she has the stature of a president, against 60% for Sarkozy.

That in itself could be of little importance at this early stage of the campaign, except for two things: one is that Sarkozy is such a professional. He is a machine for winning: since he is a keen and ruthless tennis-player I will allow myself a tennis metaphor and say that he reminds me of Björn Borg in the mid 1970’s, almost too focussed on winning. Once he gets a lead it is going to be very hard to catch up. People vote for success probably more than for cogent policies.

Royal’s drop in popularity is also important because she is being pulled down by her insistence on people’s democracy, and she is going to have to decide whether or not to jettison it. That’s a paradox, because it was people’s democracy which catapulted her into the driving seat of the Socialist Party. But she has yet to see the difference between fighting to be a party’s official candidate and fighting to be president of France. There is no doubt that her policy of participative democracy and the use of the internet gave her a huge popularity all last year amongst those disillusioned with the present political system. Learning from that, she announced she would spend the first month of the campaign listening. It sounds so refreshingly sensible – but that’s why she is losing ground so fast. Her rival is out there making rousing speeches, promising the earth while she quietly listens to ordinary people. And when she does speak, she puts her foot right in it. When it’s not her, it’s either her partner or her official spokesman. It is a very ragged, amateur team. What she is doing makes a lot of sense to those fed-up with conventional politics, but tactically it is a no-hoper: by the time she has decided what her policies are going to be (February 11^th, 2½ weeks away), Sarkozy’s lead will be beyond her. Unless of course he makes a major mistake. Which is what the Socialist Party is now looking for. At the beginning of the campaign Royal promised she would not demean herself to making personal attacks. It has not yet come to that, but the party did admit that as of Tuesday there is now a dedicated cell scouring Sarkozy’s speeches looking to capitalise on any possible weak link. They were helped in this by yesterday’s “Canard Enchainé”, a satirical but also probingly investigative weekly, which announced that Sarkozy’s party has used the Renseignements généraux, a sort of information gathering branch of internal security, controlled by the minister of the interior, to dig up dirt on Royal’s ecology spokesman, Bruno Rebelle, former No.2 of Greenpeace International. In riposte, the Socialist Party has asked Jacques Chirac to force Sarkozy to resign as Minister of the Interior, claiming that he is abusing the considerable means at his disposal to order such investigations.

The time for dreaming is fast drawing to a close, and the campaign is turning into yet another dirty little war.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 9:31 am and is filed under General France, Political, Ségolène Royal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.