FRANCE: Segolene Royal holds her first news conference after being elected Socialist candidate for next year's presidential election

Segolene Royal pledged a new style of leadership on Friday (November 17) after her sweeping victory in the Socialist presidential primary took her a step closer to becoming the country's first woman president. Royal, 53, was overwhelmingly endorsed as party candidate, winning over 60 percent of the vote in a poll of party members after an often rancourous internal campaign in which her emphasis on values and symbolism over concrete policy paid off. "Yes, I'm inviting you to imagine France because France has changed a lot, has diversified and coloured without admitting totally what happened to her. To take advantage and pride of this France, we must continue to recognize all these youngsters whose families came from abroad and who, today, have full French citizenship besides being faced with discrimination", she said in a speech in Melle in the western Poitou-Charentes region she presides. On Friday she sought to reassure supporters deeply suspicious of market-friendly policies by matching her calls for change with pledges to remain true to party ideals. "Yes, let's imagine a France that has changed a lot, has diversified and coloured without admitting totally what happened to her. To take advantage and pride of this France, we must continue to recognize all these youngsters whose families came from abroad and who, today, have full French citizenship besides being faced with discrimination", she said, calling for more social justice and speaking out against rampant free-market economics. Despite a long career in politics, Royal has managed to present herself as a fresh face willing to listen to the concerns of ordinary people, enraging opponents who say she lacks convictions but winning over voters tired of the unchanging ways of the French political elite. The scale of her win over former Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn and former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius confounded leftist critics who had portrayed her as a lightweight populist ready to throw the party's convictions out the window. It also set her up for the upcoming fight expected with the right's likely candidate, hardline Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, and will speed the start of the 2007 campaign proper. Pierre Giacometti, Director General of Ipsos polling organisation in Paris commented on the results and said: "She recorded a massive success in the north of France, in the Bouches du Rhone, in Herault which was superior to the average results. It really means that there is a support and a legitimacy from a new generation of socialist militants and at the same time these results come from her charm and also from the old militants who lived 2002 and who remember the disaster caused by the absence of dynamism and also by Lionel Jospin's candidacy at the time." He also added that winning primaries did not mean automatically win the presidential elections. "What happened is like a preliminary phase. Segolene Royal won the Socialist party primaries but she now compete for the final and it has nothing to do with the primaries. You can be excellent during the primaries but you can lose the final very easily," he said. Before confronting Sarkozy, however, she will need to rebuild a splintered left deeply scarred by the 2002 presidential election, when Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin was knocked out by far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. The task might be tough because she has campaigned on positions often taking her away from the traditional party line, questioning the 35-hour work week or calling for boot camps for young delinquents -- positions rather associated with the right.

ITN Source | November 17, 2006

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