Royal and Sarkozy tiptoe around the internet
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.