Race for the Muddle

Will she? could she? What is she? As anyone not living under a stone knows by now, Ségolène Royal is the new darling of French politics. With a stratospheric approval rating of 73 percent, she has displaced all comers as the front runner to replace Jacques Chirac in next year's presidential election, and the country is buzzing with speculation: Will her own party, the Socialists, tap her as their candidate? Would she win if they did? But perhaps most telling, amid this frenzy of Ségolisme, is that the candidate herself felt compelled to stand and declare herself. "I am a Socialist," she recently assured her adoring public.

It's good she did, for on this point there's room for doubt. Even fellow Socialists brand her a "second Sarkozy," referring to the tough-talking conservative Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, who for much of the past year has been his party's most likely champion to succeed Chirac. And to be fair, they are right to be confused. Earlier this month Royal stole a march on her right-wing rival by proposing to scrap a pillar of the modern French welfare state, the 35-hour workweek. "Too flexible," she pronounced it--a threat to the rights and incomes of full-time workers. That came just days after she outflanked Sarkozy on another of his favorite issues, law and order. The way to deal with first-time criminal offenders, she suggested, was discipline within "a military framework" to instill correct principles of honesty, hard work and community service.

Her remarks sent Socialist elders into meltdown. Her own life partner and the father of her four children, Socialist Party leader François Hollande, condemned them as near apostasy. As the Socialists struggled to pull together a platform for the coming presidential campaign, to be voted on by the party faithful this week, her ideas were conspicuously absent. Yet here's the rub: according to recent polls, 66 percent of French voters say they approve of them, even if party leaders do not. If Royal continues her rise, the Socialists will be presented with a tough choice: adherence to nearly a century of ideological tradition--this is a party, after all, that still views the world as a struggle between capital and labor and sings the "Internationale" at official gatherings--or winning back the Elysée after 12 years. Beyond that, there's the bigger question of what all this represents. In her drive to the presidency, is Ségolène Royal at long last pulling France's old-fashioned Socialist Party into the modern era? Or is she merely duplicating a trend seen elsewhere in Europe--the triumph of the muddled, messy politics of the middle?

In a sense, France is playing catch-up. A decade ago Tony Blair established the dominance of Britain's Labour Party by essentially stealing the Tories' turf. The politics of New Labour is very much the politics of the middle--Thatcherite free markets coupled with moderate European social welfare. Today, Conservative Party leader David Cameron scarcely conceals his intention to retake Downing Street as a virtual Blairite, representing himself as a fresh face to replace a prime minister whom Britons have tired of, even as he continues his predecessor's policies. In Germany, the election of Angela Merkel's still-young coalition government all but marked an end to politics. The new chancellor began her campaign last year calling for a mandate for change. But as soon as she started preaching the tough reforms economists say are needed to get Germany going again, her substantial edge in the polls melted away. Faced with a choice between the conservative Christian Democrats and the opposition Social Democratic Party, Germans voted "both" and "neither." They wanted a single government comprising both camps and wedded to the status quo. And they got just that.

The muddle is partly the result of a basic contradiction built into Europe's fractured political landscape, where voters often want different things from their parties than they want for their countries. In France, for instance, presidential elections usually take place in two stages. During the first, multicandidate round, contenders must mobilize the party stalwarts, who in turn (if disgruntled) may cast protest ballots for extremists. Candidates making it to the second round--one on one--veer to the center.

The record shows that if you rush to the middle too early, however, your party feels betrayed, and you're dead. Witness the 2002 ballot. Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin, prime minister for five years, tried to expand his base by declaring early on that his plans for the country were not "socialist." "That was second-round discourse," says Dominique Reynié, director of the Interregional Politics Observatory in Paris, and it was fatal. Party "faithful" promptly proved they weren't, voting in the first round for the far-left fringe. When Jospin was knocked out of the finals by ultra-rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen, Chirac won re-election by a landslide.

Haunted by that disaster, the heavyweights of the Socialist Party, known as the elephants, have been trying to assemble a program that will win back the far left. Thus Royal's lack of influence. But no matter. She's betting that first-round protest votes are less about ideology than a hunger for fresh images and ideas. Like Sarkozy, she senses that voters have wearied of the same old faces, left or right. They don't want extremes; they want something new, and that's what Royal seems to be. She's outpaced her Socialist rivals by such a huge margin that the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné recently ran a cartoon portraying her as Snow White surrounded by Socialist dwarfs.

So much for the elephants. Royal "is seen as a woman who's strict, conservative in her mores, attached to the family as a structuring element in society," says Reynié. Yet when it comes to politics, she's pragmatic, seeming to cherry-pick from left and right. Recently, she came out strongly in favor of civil unions for gays. the puritan royal brings the homos to the altar, read a headline in the left-wing daily Libération. She attacked the 35-hour workweek but strongly opposed the government's effort to liberalize the country's labor laws by making it easier for companies to hire (and fire) young workers. Royal's personal saga helps justify these contradictions. The daughter of a soldier--a deadbeat dad who left his family with nothing to survive on but charity--she has no trouble extolling the virtues of military discipline while sympathizing with the poor.

The political center gets murkier still as Sarkozy tries to stop Royal by ... embracing her. "Madame Royal can join us," he joked this month, playing to Socialist misgivings about her ideological bona fides. "Welcome to the club!" He surely hopes that Royal's own party stops her, because polls show the two of them in a near dead heat. Leave it to Le Pen, who remains the right-wing éminence noire of French politics, to sum up the confusion at the center: "Sarkozy is a man of the right who always wants to please the left, and Madame Royal is a fake woman of the left who thinks herself an American Marine sergeant."

Independent, unclassifiable--Royal's image may be muddled, but it's never middling. Yes, she is a Socialist, just not doctrinaire. And if the party can forgive her for that, she could well be the next president of France.